Monday 17 January 2011

How thick can they get?



An article in one of the GP news rags made us wonder just how thick you need to be in order to dictate UK health care policy? We suspect that a medical degree would automatically disqualify one. We also suspect that an art’s degree and the word politician automatically qualifies one to dabble in areas where one has no experience and as a result come up with ideas of how to screw up the health service.

The article is here.

Read through it. The second paragraph rings alarm bells for it says that:

“GP consortia will roll out the Department of Health’s flagship urgent care clinical dashboard . . .”

Is a “clinical dashboard” the same as another buzzword bingo word called “tool” or “toolkit” which is usually a functionally useless, but expensive piece of crap software paid for by NHS managers who think that if it is on a computer it works for they don’t?

A bad workman is said to blame their tools but in the health service bad care is usually the rest of “tools” manufactured by even worse “tools”. Think productive ward.

This dashboard “will hold GPs in their area to account for their patients’ A&E attendance, unscheduled admissions and hospitals”.

Take for example the condition known as appendicitis. This is an unpredictable surgical emergency and as it is such it would be classed as an unscheduled admission. Should GPs now beat with rubber hoses any patient that dares have an “unscheduled admission” with appendicitis after reading their dashboard?

Have a look at some real dashboards. Virtually all overpaid lazy GPs will recognize the first one for they drive into work each day and use this one. For your average overpaid hospital consultant they will probably recognize this one for they will fly it into their office each day before counting their ill gotten overtime for working extra hours in their free time.

Then have a look at this Department of Health’s flagship urgent care clinical dashboard. We bet your average GP would like to sit down on its bespoke leather heated electrically adjustable seats, smell that expensive new dashboard and get their sweaty palms on this “tool” before pressing some “knobs” and buttons hard enough to push this “tool” to its max to feel its throbbing boost to their professional performance.

Unfortunately there will be, and have been, some retarded enough to do so.

There is even an NHS website (no surprise there then) so you can spend hours going round in circles.

There is even a video where the time expired grey haired lady speaks for herself if you can stand the crude editing. It reminded the team of something similar from a few years ago regarding C&B. Grey haired Northernshire time expired lady GPs being used to foist sh*te on those still in work? Is this a new trend in pr (not the medical kind)?

Read on and weep as the dashboards performance stats are that it:

can slash unscheduled admissions by 20% (we know slash has another meaning?)

and

help hospitals cut length of stay by a quarter (ditto length?).

Look here and see what is claimed with a bit less spin. Can you see how many practices can achieve this success story before a roll out as per Choose and Book occurs? One out of how many?

In contrast to the Ferrari and the 747 dashboards, both of which have controls that allow the user to adjust performance in real time, where are the controls, the accelerators, the brakes, the flaps needed to restore an acceptable level of performance on the Department of Health’s flagship urgent care clinical dashboard?

If the car goes too fast you can slow down, if the aircraft goes too high you can level off but the clinical dashboard?

The final paragraph of the article makes out how really good the project is:

“The project delivery will be the responsibility of the local NHS/PCT/GP consortia and there is no central funding available to provide local resources, hardware or software.”

Imagine Boeing or Airbus saying we have a new aircraft but cannot provide the aircraft, fuel it or fly it. What do you have as a result that is flyable?

Still they want 10 GP commissioning consortia to start “piloting” the Department of Health’s flagship urgent care clinical dashboard. Sink estate, or spearhead PCTs, and their consortia only should apply. And probably will.

Praise be to the Party for spending on offensive brown smelling ideas instead of what patients actually want and need.

Healthcare from those that can deliver it.

You don’t need a dashboard to do that, just training.







No comments: