Money well spent?

Alzheimer’s’ Research UK is a fast growing charity that has caught the eye of Whitbread, a leading hospitality business and the owner of Premier Inn, the UK's biggest hotel brand.  Whitbread has worked in partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital for the past 10 years, raising £19 million for the hospital. Now ARUK is in competition with Cancer Research UK and Great Ormond Street to be Whitbread’s next charity partner. They are neck and neck, it seems, so Whitbread’s 35,000 staff are being encouraged to vote for their choice.

Alzheimer’s Research UK asks anyone who works for Whitbread, Premier Inn, Brewers Fayre, Beefeater, Bar+Block, Cookhouse Pub, Thyme or Table Table? to vote for ARUK. The ARUK sales pitch is that “over half of [Whitbread’s] staff will know someone close to them affected by dementia, but there are no effective treatments to slow, stop or cure it. Yet. Research has already made incredible progress treating other conditions. We now urgently need to do the same for people with dementia so vote for Alzheimer’s Research UK and help find the first life-changing treatment and cure for dementia”.

News from Nowhere is sceptical about the dementia research community, which has been barking up the wrong tree about dementia for decades, and has failed to produce a successful treatment, despite many promises. Given the social determinants of dementia, treatment and cure may be illusory notions anyway.  A public health approach might make more sense, or alternatively a disability-oriented response could offer much. The trouble is that neither of these options has the halo of science around it.

Source:  https://www.whitbread.co.uk/sustainability/community/charity-partner/ 

Are you a rainmaker? 

Probably not, although one or two NfN moles come close. A rainmaker is any person who brings clients, money, business, or even intangible prestige to an organization based solely on his or her associations and contacts. Top-level consultants being recruited for London’s 184-bed private hospital The Cleveland Clinic are likely to be rainmakers because of their deep knowledge of the capital’s NHS, their professional contacts in the teaching hospitals, and their personal achievements. Some 270 high-end consultants are being sought. They will earn between £350,000 and £500,000 a year from combined clinical, research and managerial income streams. The Cleveland Clinic aims to occupy a niche for complex problems in very ill people who have “run out of hope”, according to its CEO. This sounds like palliative care by another name, which could be competitive in an international market but not necessarily a threat to the NHS. The major UK losers may turn out to be existing private sector hospitals that don’t have enough rainmakers. 

Sources:  https://www.investopedia.com › ...Julia Kollewe  ‘Betting against the NHS’ £1bn hospital in London signals shift to two-tier system  The Guardian  17th March 2022

Move fast and break things

The Broad Left Doctors Broadsheet landed on an NfN mole’s desktop recently. It expresses the opinions of a small group of junior doctors and medical students working within the British Medical Association. The term Broad Left puzzles some of the older moles, who associate it with a political tendency that fizzled out in the nineties. The broadsheet’s language is workerist (‘rank and file’ organisation, ‘accountability’) and moralistic –they are righteously against all bad attitudes. Their aim seems to be to shake up the BMA and make it a more aggressive trades union. Moles of the 1976 vintage make two points about this little group. First, it has room to grow within the BMA because the medical left (in both the Socialist Health Association and Doctors in Unite) has produced nothing of any value in the last twenty years and could do with a bit of competition (ed: sharp intake of breath). Second, the BMA has a long history of absorbing and channelling critical opinion within the profession. Who remembers the Junior Hospital Doctors Association? News from Nowhere does and will watch the newcomers with interest.

Source: www.doctorsbroadsheet.org 

The Cancer service problem

The NHS has a relatively poor standard of cancer care. Access times were improved by New Labour’s reforms but are lengthening again. Ways of gaming the 2 weeks wait target have allowed some cancer units to appear to be functioning well when diagnoses have actually been delayed. Part of the problem is that these services run on a shallow pool of qualified staff, sometimes using ageing equipment. News from Nowhere moles report signs of a return to pre-pandemic levels of activity in cancer services, but recovery is variable, being more evident in endoscopy clinics than it is in other diagnostic services, like ultrasound. The prospect of achieving improvements by out-sourcing to the commercial sector is not realistic. The commercial sector is experiencing a surge in self-pay patients and now has its own backlogs, so it is less keen to do NHS work, at least for the moment. So what is to be done?

Source: HSJ Podcast 25/3/22

Violence and the NHS

Healthcare leaders in London have written an open message to NHS staff, drawing attention to “the dangerous level” of abuse many are confronted with, “simply for going to work”. Violence against NHS staff is a long-standing problem, which does seem to have worsened since the pandemic. Mental health services and A&E departments have evolved ways of containing violence, with, for example, dedicated security staff and protocols for managing aggressive patients. However, violence seems to be spreading to outpatient clinics, ambulance services, in-patient wards and general practices 

 Nowhere moles offer three thoughts that might explain the increase in aggression and violence. First, patients are waiting longer for less and are becoming angry. Second, different services are blaming each other (if only GPs offered more appointments there would be less aggro in A&E etc.), and this is picked up by the public. Finally, anti-vaxxers are particularly disruptive, even though few in number, because they project paranoid ideas that are picked up and used by other aggrieved patients. Further thoughts welcome.

Source: Anabelle Collins Abuse of staff at ‘dangerous level’, say NHS bosses  HSJ 21/3/22 and HSJ Podcast 25/3/22

Read more News from Nowhere and articles on the NHS in ERA 3 at http://www.healthmatters.org.uk/