Posted on 02/06/2009 8:48:52 PM PST by bruinbirdman
What's wrong with the NHS is that the Government won't let it get its hands dirty any more. Nurses don't nurse and young student doctors (FY1s) aren't allowed to doctor. They do "training modules" on-screen in classrooms.
This week, Alan Johnson launched an unworkable National Dementia Strategy for England. Johnson is keen to reverse the "stigma" about dementia by promising £150 million for 17 key initiatives, or whatever they call wish lists now. None of the money (looks tiny these days, doesn't it?) will be spent on research, which is beyond loopy. And I'd like to say that I haven't got a stigma about dementia. I just want to be dead before I'm too demented to know I've got it.
Some money will go, Johnson said, into "training" to help GPs recognise the symptoms of dementia. He doesn't mean my GP, obviously. If my GP needs training in symptom recognition, she's been in the wrong job 25 years. He means 2010's class of FY1s hunched over their keyboards, poor beasts.
Phil Hope (heard of him? Me neither) took to the airwaves to promise "a memory clinic in every town". What is a memory clinic? Hope (minister for social care – says it's a one-stop shop offering expert assessment, support, and advice to those with memory problems and their carers.
Does he know that there are more than 1,000 towns in England? Is he going to pay all those "expert assessors"? Because if he is, that's Johnson's £150 million gone at a stroke. No government expert (or Dementia Tsar) would settle for less than a £150k package in these days of inflated public-sector pay.
But wait – Hope told the Nursing Times that "dementia advisers could come from a variety of health care backgrounds, including nurses". So they won't be tsars
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
No, they need a free market medical service. ;-)
They need the machine that goes “Bing!”
Bump!
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