Privatisation, NHS and food

[Joe-b-1]

Sixty years of nationalised industry proved the point well enough.

 

No it hasn't.

[Sunni]

When I was in hospital last year for just under a week, I was disgusted at the state of the food. Being allergic to gluten I got 2 options, salad or starve

 

what hospital were you in? were the staff aware that you needed a gluten free menu? if one wasn't supplied to you, that is an issue with the support staff at ward level, and you should have complained at the time. I do not believe that those two options were the only two offered.

[Greybeard]

Give it a couple of years and it won't be just catering and cleaning that have been privatised. Surgery, medicine, nursing, physio...the whole shebang will be farmed out to private companies concerned with nothing more than their bottom line, so you can expect a general slump in standards all round. Devil take the patients.

 

I've been in hospital just once, as a day patient, in the last 35 years and I picked up an infection that required an intensive course of IV antibiotics to make any impression on.

 

The NHS privatisation bill is due to be published on Wednesday I think.

[Rupert_Baehr]

Give it a couple of years and it won't be just catering and cleaning that have been privatised. Surgery, medicine, nursing, physio...the whole shebang will be farmed out to private companies concerned with nothing more than their bottom line, so you can expect a general slump in standards all round. Devil take the patients.

 

...

 

Why is that?

 

I've been in military hospitals, one NHS hospital [A&E Dept}, private hospitals in the UK, US and Germany.

 

I've received good treatment in all of them (though some were better than others.)

 

Surely, the purpose of the NHS is to provide medical treatment for patients, not employment for members of a particular union?

 

Why should a degree of privatisation mean a reduction in the standard of service?

 

In Germany (where I am at the moment) the law requires that ALL persons have medical insurance. Some people have private insurance, the majority pay a percentage of their salary into the State scheme ('die [Kranken]kasse.')

 

Everybody who sees a doctor or who goes into hospital gets a bill. If you are in a hospital and you get a bill and are insured by die Kasse, you take the bill to the window next door to the one you got it from and they sort it. - They pay the hospital.

 

Hospitals and doctors can charge private patients whatever they can get away with, but the charges for patients insured by the state are laid down by law ... in excruciating detail! - Every item of treatment is billed individually and has the reference to the article of public law which lays down the charge. The charges are competitive, too.

 

If you, a private company, want to set up a hospital, go ahead! You will compete with other hospitals for patients and you will be paid the 'going rate' (the rate laid down by law) for the services you provide.

 

Should you elect to employ many hundreds of highly-paid administrators; well, it's your business. It's up to you how you run it. You get paid piece-work rates, your medical staff must be proeprly qualified but you can hire as many administrators as you like and pay them as much as you like.

 

There is no vast pot of money from the government which you can use (or abuse) to pay for a bloated administrative staff. Administrative staff is a part of your overhead. You're running the hospital.

 

Of course, if you don't have an adquate administrative staff you will be unable to run the hospital efficiently. It is not the business of the state to tell you how to run your business. Get it right and you will have plenty of patients and probably make a fair bit of money. Get it wrong and the patients will go elsewhere.

 

It seems to work. The waiting time for treatment is usually short. (If there's a queue, somebody will come along and take the patients who are waiting) and you don't hear excuses of 'we've run out of money, we aren't doing those procedures until next fiscal year' - Hospitals get paid for what they do, not given a pot of money.

 

Here, the hospitals are responsible for the medical treatment bit and the state insurance scheme is responsible for the payment bit.

 

In he UK, the NHS gets money, some of that goes to the PCTs, gets passed to hospitals, they spend it and when there isn't enough money to go around procedures are delayed and it's somebody else's fault.

 

Why do you think privatisation would be less efficient than that?

 

How?