Your Voice in Sheffield Mental Health

Don’t get too excited about the so-called “rethink” or “pause” the government is supposed to be engaged in. Anyone who knows anything about NHS commissioning will know that the old system is already being broken down. Indeed, it was already breaking down under Labour. The Strategic Health Authorities will certainly go, and the PCTs won’t last in their current form.

Since this is a business government (trying to get a grip on “growth”), the government will deal with businesses (i.e., the doctors) as the key people to stimulate growth. They will do that by re-hiring some of the experts thrown out in the changes — but not as employees, rather as little businesses. These little businesses will have specialisms — like procurement of imaging equipment, or provision of caring staff, data management, etc. And there will be hundreds of them, up and down the country, all needing to hire people at lower costs and more realistic conditions than in the present system.

They’ll do the same with education, the law and security, too.

The old nursing unions and Royal Colleges will decline; consultants in hospitals will set up micro-businesses within each Trust; private health will flourish. But the NHS will still be free at the point of delivery, though this does not mean that the would-be costs can all be met. We will have rationing, which is OK as long as people are given more of a chance of taking care of themselves. Terminal illness care will have to improve, for example, but why can’t GPs authorise patients to arrange their own annual health checks (at one of the “little businesses” who will send their bill to the GP), their own medications (at some fixed flat charge for everyone not on means-tested benefits), injections for travel, emergency care (via decent Ambulance and other services, who again, will bill the GP)? So long as we can, then we should.

If any of this stimulates our economy while treating most people’s health problems — then good. I’m tired of time-serving medical staff who can’t be bothered to care for patients properly. I’d be happy being nursed by a partly-literate teenager on minimum wages, so long as they showed genuine care. The age of graduate nursing is probably over. I have nothing against graduates, but as a recent study showed, “Caring contact” declines in direct ratio to education and training attainment. You can’t teach someone how to nurse, if they don’t know what it is to care.

The Prime Minister today did some gross politicking.  Convinced that his conservative grassroots needed some red meat to chew on, he chose Maundy Thursday — a time for generosity, contrition and humility — to slag off the 80,000 alcoholics, drug addicts and obese people who have ended up, over many years, getting Incapacity Benefit.

WHAT???

0.0013% of the population get £30 or so more a week (and they will have been in work, paying National Insurance) than healthy people.  So what?  Has Cameron considered the reasons people become alcoholics or drug addicts or obese?  Is it all “moral weakness”??

My brittle and severe Bipolar 1 went undiagnosed for 20 years.  Without medicines, the only way I could cope was by trying to dampen down highs and smoothe out lows with booze.  Of course it doesn’t work and I became an alcoholic.  I stopped many times — 2 years here, one years there, usually just a few months — before I finally used AA to kick it nearly five years ago.

But I worked most of the time, when I could, and I didn’t even know that I could get out-of-work benefits until the mid-90s.

Indeed, many thousands of those who could claim benefits of all kinds, never do — through pride, ignorance or general disorganisation.

I’ve paid taxes since I was 14 — 50 years worth.  I don’t feel guilty claiming the benefits I get.  I can’t do paid work any more because my judgment is very unreliable, and the medicines don’t really control all my delusions and extreme moods.   But, I am profundly grateful to the British Social Model which allows me to survive (if I’m frugal) on the benefits I get.  And I try to “give back” by voluntary (sedentary) work with mental health services, educators and charities — places which can monitor my activities and tell me when I’m not too well.  Indeed, I’m part of the “Big Society”, as are most people I know.

The mob out there who seem to want to throw disabled people to the dogs, just because they have been desperate to find a way out of their mental anguish — that mob is not British; that mob is bitter, twisted and selfish.

And Mr. Cameron is a great disappointment for stooping to such a level.  For a man who has been through his own personal catastrophes, I would have hoped he could have been reasoned, rather than populist, about the stupid DWP statistics which his government pumped out to feed the tabloids.

Deplorable.