May 10 2007
Ten years on and still mixed wards
Tony Blair’s famous criticism of mixed wards in 1996 did not help him sort the problem out during his 10 year stay in Downing Street.
He failed because in this as in many public service areas he did not work out how to change and reform the public sector.He believed that showering the NHS with money would solve all the problems, and that they would let him have his way over mixed wards in gratitude. Instead he leaves office with the staff very unhappy with what has been going on, and with the government having to admit that they were wrong when they told us mixed wards were all but eliminated.
An Opposition party has to learn not just the arts of opposition - words and campaigns - but also to learn how to handle the complexities of government. One of the reasons his health service policy failed was the ridiculous complexity of the bureaucracy presiding over it all. Just saying you want something to happen from the centre does not work. The more the government claimed about the NHS, the more disbelief they generated, because the truth on the ground was different.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Perhaps more worryingly still, was the news today that British cancer survival rates are the lowest in Western Europe. This suggests to me, after tripling spending in a decade, that a nationalised system of healthcare may not the be the best system possible system, bearing in mind it achieves the worst outcomes.
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Thank you for referring to this very important issue of mixed wards. It is an issue of safety that is just as important as the problems still facing the NHS in trying to provide rapid access to adequate treatment for life threatening and serious illnesses.
Men and women should be segregated in hospitals. The rape and abuse of patients in mental hospitals, which has been well documented in the press in recent years, for example, in The Times and more recently The Independent, as well as on a channel 4 documentary, serves to illustrate this point. It is not a trivial issue of discomfort.
It’s important to challenge the government on this issue and on the state of NHS services. Politicians, everyone in fact, needs to work together, to debate and try to establish concrete, practical ways in which it might be possible for the vast majority of money and resources provided for the NHS to actually reach patients and local services rather than being swallowed up by bureaucracy, or lost due to the need to meet government targets. A lot of money has been made available in the last few years; this is progress, although it isn’t nearly enough yet. How do you suggest it can be better managed?
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