Private hospital group aims to delay care for NHS patinets to get them to pay more for private care

The Independent reported in July that an executive director of BMI hospitals (this is Bernie Creaven, just so that the face and name become as widely known as possible) told its consultants to delay NHS patients' admission for treatment on the NHS contracts to encourage them to go private (and make BMI more money).

Apparently the poor diddums are not making enough money because NHS waiting lists are too low, so they're keen to get back to the position during the last Conservative government in which waiting lists were so long that people were forced to spend their money on private care. It's another way in which the government hopes to cut the cost of the NHS by co-payment (the jargon for making people pay some of the costs), just as all government have been doing over the past thirty years by transferring as much care as possible into social care.

And all this, of course, affects older people most, because they are more likely to need routine 'elective' healthcare. It's not elective if you are can't carry on with your life because you are in pain; that's something that the government hopes younger people won't think about when they vote because they don't have to live with 'multiple co-morbidities' (the jargon for  having a lot of minor disabilities wrong with you that make your life miserable but don't actually kill you).

The government is going to tell BMI healthcare not to do this. I suspect they are going to have to get their regulators to do a lot of chasing round to put a stop to this sot of thing as the new NHS emerges. In my blog on 'big society' policy, I have pointed out that big companies take over government projects because true community organisations work have locally, and can't and don't want to 'scale up' to run a giant programme.  Examples are A4e, the company that are making a lot of money out of the work programme for unemployed people, and Serco, the profit-makers who are bidding to take over the National Citizen Service, the volunteer programme for young people which is being piloted at the moment (and aims to find unemployed youngsters something to do). These big organisations are interested in their profits. I'm calling them the 'big privates'.

As Ms Creaven has clearly demonstrated, the profits are more important than the best service for patients. The private healthcare providers have big privates, too, it seems.

Link to The Independent report.

Economical, interesting tips and the feminism of class division

With Margaret for dinner at the Savoy; it's a birthday treat, and is because she found out from our minister (of religion, not our MP who is a minister of state) that it is economical (relatively - at least economical enough for a minister of religion to be seen doing) to go to the Savoy River Restaurant at 5.30pm for the pre-theatre menu (but if you're really being cheap don't have the wine, which is an astronomical price, and they will give you free tap water if you ask). This is my living economically tip for any older readers of this blog whose pension has been defenestrated.

Then to The Pitman Painters, in its last few weeks at the Duchess Theatre. It's by Lee Hall, the author of Billy Elliott, and it was at the National and on Broadway a few years ago having started out at The Live theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It's about a group of miners in the '30s who hire (through the WEA) a lecturer on art, who decides doing is better than seeing. They became quite famous as the Ashington Group of artists, and there is a gallery in a mining museum in Northumberland, not far from Morpeth.

The website of the Woodhorn Colliery Museum: http://www.ashingtongroup.co.uk/home.html (This is my interesting things to do tip for any older readers of this blog who happen to go that far north).

The play is funny and well performed, but there's a political point too. The final scene is just before the nationalisation of the coal industry; scenes of jubilation etc, and positive mention of the wonders of the National Health Service, soon to come into being. A few points were also made about the complete loss of the coal industry in the 1980s. I wonder what the plays of the future will say about the current NHS reform?

Margaret, who is always suspicious about my lack of feminist social awareness in doing more or less anything, but particularly in selecting her celebratory entertainment, asks, as she settles into her seat: 'Has it only got men?' I count the cast list, and it turns out there are three female characters, played by two actresses. One actress, it turns out, plays a working class woman in the first act and (tastefully) takes her clothes off to general consternation among the more respectable miners, while one plays an aristocrat, who doesn't (and in fact has a sequence of quite elegant period-style gowns). There must be a message about class division there, too.