The Guardian today has a smirky Andrew Lansley on the page looking as if he's getting ready to address the Royal College of Nurses a the opening of their annual union congress.
There is growing evidence that hospitals are struggling to cope because of the cutbacks brought in by the health secretary who has brought his policies kicking and screaming - though not too loudly - into play. The union is reporting of 61,113 posts having been lost since April 2010 in order to save the country £20bn by 2015.
If you starve and artery of blood it will eventually, sooner rather than later, atrophy or at least become dysfunctional.
My sister was returning on a cruise from New Zealand to her home in Perth when she suffered a pulmonary oedema - a condition of the lungs due to fluid retained in the being retained and described in an NHS publication as "one of the most serious and life-threatening situations in emergency medicine." She was hospitalised on the ship and put on life support then delivered to a hospital in Melbourne where she lay in an induced coma for a number of days. She then underwent a triple bypass, had a pacemaker installed then flown back to Perth. Her comment when I phoned her the other day, "I feel one-hundred percent now. The hospital was amazing - we have such a great medical system here."
As far as I'm aware, we have a great medical service in Scotland that we pay for through our insurance contributions deducted from our wages. There are increasing reports of how things have recently deteriorated in the service, nothing statistical, but some real comments from real people I've talked too.
And this is only the start. Loss of jobs at the front, community nursing being depleted, an increase on the workload of those left behind to do the work labouring over their remitted hours unpaid, taking administrative work home to complete and, on occasion, having to reapply for their poet with a cut in wages, hours and a depleted pension.
With the policy of slashing funding we can now imagine Lansley and Cameron rubbing their grubby little hand with glee: profit from market forces lighting up their beady eyes.
I'm leaving soon for a senior gap year to Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Nepal, Sikkim, India, Sri Lanka, US and Canada. I wonder what will be the outcome of the policies when I return. Strikes ahead and a further deterioration of the service?
