Scene: a secret bar located in the basement of Number Ten. The Prime Minister and his Director of Communications sit alone sipping lager.
dc: Coalition’s not going so well.
ac: Oh my God, sir!
dc: Press hounds everywhere, sniffing at our backsides.
Crossing the Circle
The twilight shadows of Southern Cross have today grown longer, as news emerges that the troubled care home chain is to shut down. The chill of closure will be felt most keenly by the 31,000 vulnerable residents and their families, but the shadow is a long one. Southern Cross’s opco-propco business model, which separates out the operating interest, Southern Cross, from the property owning interests, the care home landlords, has become increasingly popular over the last decade A number of health and care businesses have adopted a similar approach, including the private hospital and ISTC operator Circle, tipped to take over operation of the bust NHS Hinchingbrooke Hospital later this year. Could the cross of Southern’s shadow extend as far as, even cross, Circle’s circle? Almost certainly, the answer is yes.
Trust Me, I’m a Whistleblower
There has been something of a trumpet voluntary on the whistleblowing front over the last week. The King, Queen and Godfather of medical whistleblowers have co-authored a paper, which the JRSM has foolishly – it’s about whistleblowing, for Heaven’s sake – hidden behind a paywall – only to allow its publication, via Queen Blow’s own website. Radio Horlicks simmered away on Thursday, with a half hour Report featuring the shimmery voiced Dr Kim Holt. And the Eye (related website here) has produced a Shoot The Messenger NHS Whistleblowing ‘Special’, an eight page dossier of gagged and stuffed doctors hung out to dry, complete with red borders and menacing target images. Queen Blow, however, is conspicuous by her absence from this report – apparently following an iPal tiff – so leaving the Eye a Wonderbra short on the sex appeal front.
Be Careful What You Vote For
Next time you meet a nurse, ask him or her what the NHS reforms are about. Almost certainly the answer will be ‘I’m not really sure…I don’t really understand them’.
Next time you see your doctor, ask him or her what the NHS reforms are about. A few might know, and give their version, seen through their political prism, but from the rest, the answer will be: ‘Waterworks OK?’ Sub-text: stop asking me stupid questions I don’t know the answers to.
Email your MP and ask them what is his or her position on the NHS reforms, and nine times out of ten you will get his or her party’s standard issue response. Probe further, and it will become clear that he or she hasn’t the foggiest.
Trivial Pursuits
Millipede, Master of the Trivial Pursuit, continued his chase of the ineffable at PMQs earlier this week. He posed vexing questions, one after the other. Or maybe he vexed, posing questions. No one was quite sure. The PM was riled, having just been told to shut it by the speaker, and had no intention whatsoever of playing Mornington Crescent – by Stott’s Fifth Ammendment rules or any other for that matter – with the Right Hon. Gent. for Doncaster North. Instead, the PM had about him the air of a man who wanted to shoot something, preferably something with horns on it, like the Hon. Gent. opposite, but tiresomely had shot his gillie, or maybe it was his wife, instead.
Meanwhile, the Hon. Gent. for Doncaster North continued to bombard the PM with the kind of questions more commonly found in the economy ranges of Christmas crackers. It was said he might ask how many fish swam in the Serpentine, or how many paperclips Mr Stephen Dorrell, MP, the once and future health secretary, had secreted in his ears. These, then, were the pressing questions the house was obliged to contemplate; and these, then, were the questions to which only Millipede knew the answers.
Shrinking Your World
One of Dr No’s retired medical friends, not teetotal, but almost, inherited an adequate wine cellar, mostly reds, from a relative. Given a science backed consensus that small amounts of red wine would be good for him, he decided not to dispose of the cellar on favourable terms to Dr No – Dr No is always happy to help an old friend out – but to indulge in a spot of self prescribing: ℞ vinum rubeum, 1-2 glasses nocte.
Elsewhere, an old biddy friend of Dr No’s mother, bereaved last year, has taken to keeping a bottle of sweet sherry in with the tea cosies, and of an evening she warms her soul as she dozes in front of the television with a tipple or two. Not so long ago, a grandad patient of Dr No’s asked: ‘No harm in an evening sharpener? Just scotch and water, you understand.’ Dr No knew it would be a large tumbler, and a generous slop, but still he answered ‘not at all’ – and didn’t even caution against excess. This chap had survived the not only the horror of Burma in the Second World War, but the long years of following memories as well, and the last thing he needed was a ticking off from Dr No.
Choice Macht Frei
The Nazis – OK, it’s reductio ad Hitlerum time again, and why not – weren’t shy when it came to abusing words. Arrivals at the deaths camps were encouraged to keep their peckers up by a slogan emblazoned over the camp gates. ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘Work Makes You Free’. It is hard to conceive of a more gratuitous exhortation on a gate that led not to freedom but to extermination: yet there it was, in all its mocking irony.
Duplicitousness is of course not limited to the Nazis. Closer to home, we have Idiot Duncan Smith rattling the cages of the poxed, the blind, the legless and otherwise variously impaired skivers and shirkers under his own ‘work makes you free’ banner. And even closer to home for all of us, the Tories are railroading through their health reforms under the brightest bluest banner of them all: Choice makes you free! Choice makes you free to choose your GP, to choose your hospital and, of course, choose your treatment! Why, you can even choose to go to Zurich!
AnonyWho
Electronic braying noises. A Tardis appears. Out step Drs Crippen and Grumble. They stand side by side, surveying the scene. Dr Crippen has aged, and now looks like the first Doctor Who.
Dr Crippen: Grumble! Sorry to drag you away from the fun, old boy.
Dr Grumble: That’s alright sir.
Dr Crippen: War’s not going very well, you know.
Dr Grumble: Oh my God!
Dr Crippen: We are two down. Marshals Field and Meldrum have joined the enemy.
It Really Is About The Money
Believe it or not, Dr No is not a natural cynic. Indeed, when you think about it most doctors are not natural cynics. Much of our professional work requires the triumph of hope over experience. We have to see the best in people, and be optimistic about what we do: otherwise, our world, and then our minds, would fall apart.
Nonetheless, whether we like it or not, we doctors live in the real world, a world in which cynicism does play its part. If we want to understand that wider world, it behoves us to relax our optimistic blinkers a little, and at least allow ourselves a glance at life through the cynical telescope. We may not like what we see, but if we do not make that glance, we risk being blind to the full reality of the wider world, blind to large tracts on the tapestry of life, and blind too to the grim march of the Seven Princes of Hell across those darker tracts.
Ex Labour Con
The thing about orthopaedic surgeons is they like to throw things about. When not throwing prostheses at pretty nurses, or scalpels at pesky students, they like to throw prime ministers off wards. Mr Cameron and his retinue were excised from Guy’s Hospital the other day, as swiftly and effectively as a bunion from Miss Marple’s foot. The only thing missing in the drama was a red flashing light at the centre of the surgeon’s bow tie.
Meanwhile, Alan Milburn, late of the Red Party, has taken the Daz Blue Rinse Test, and been found to be whiter than white. He hasn’t just nailed his colours to the mast, he has sprayed them all over the Torygraph. He has accused the coalition of being lily-livered Yellow Bastards, every sad-man-jack of them.