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Great article. Healthcare is a political football in any country, but this beautiful game has reached one of its highest levels in Britain. The NHS has suffered for very many years from a lack of maturity among the politicians entrusted with its management and strategic direction, who use it to make unrealistic, flagship policy pitches. Often, these are to solve a problem no-one knew existed: Darzi centres, anyone? NHS Direct?
A large part of the problem is its status as a national treasure. As an ex-NHS GP (2012), now working exclusively in the public healthcare system in Australia, I'd say the NHS is good in parts, less good in others and, overall, has disadvantages and advantages, like any other developed nation's healthcare system. On balance, though, I'd far rather be ill in Australia, a country which spends exactly the same on healthcare per capita, than in the UK. So, it's not bad, but it's not 'special'. It's not in a league of its own as a healthcare system, which for some reason the British people believe it is. I don't think the NHS can be meaningfully managed and steered until it is somehow brought down off its pedestal in the UK psyche and viewed as what it is: no more nor less than an administrative mechanism to deliver healthcare. The hubristic blindness associated with its elevation to sacred cow status, which does not allow realistic solutions to be implemented and which requires overblown promise to be heaped upon overblown promise, is the problem.
I am not at all surprised by the lack of any evidence base attached to many political promises: I am quite old.
Neither am I surprised by the frequently dubious quality of any evidence base that politicians do quote: they are politicians.
But I agree that the NHS is enormously important for the health of the nation, and we should not allow it to be destroyed by either incoherent and dubious policy, or by right-wing ideology.
Re: Margaret McCartney: Rigging the NHS for votes
Great article. Healthcare is a political football in any country, but this beautiful game has reached one of its highest levels in Britain. The NHS has suffered for very many years from a lack of maturity among the politicians entrusted with its management and strategic direction, who use it to make unrealistic, flagship policy pitches. Often, these are to solve a problem no-one knew existed: Darzi centres, anyone? NHS Direct?
A large part of the problem is its status as a national treasure. As an ex-NHS GP (2012), now working exclusively in the public healthcare system in Australia, I'd say the NHS is good in parts, less good in others and, overall, has disadvantages and advantages, like any other developed nation's healthcare system. On balance, though, I'd far rather be ill in Australia, a country which spends exactly the same on healthcare per capita, than in the UK. So, it's not bad, but it's not 'special'. It's not in a league of its own as a healthcare system, which for some reason the British people believe it is. I don't think the NHS can be meaningfully managed and steered until it is somehow brought down off its pedestal in the UK psyche and viewed as what it is: no more nor less than an administrative mechanism to deliver healthcare. The hubristic blindness associated with its elevation to sacred cow status, which does not allow realistic solutions to be implemented and which requires overblown promise to be heaped upon overblown promise, is the problem.
Now, try and sell that to the Daily Mail!
Competing interests: No competing interests