NHS England: Perpetual Motion Quango or …Could Democracy Be The Thing That Could Ensure The Future Of The NHS?

When near to pregnancy term Tulip Siddiq was wheeled into parliament to vote and when I heard Michael Gove’s terrified speech after the Brexit vote, I saw clearly that we need a representative parliament that could restore balance to britain.

Parliament has become a place that only thinks britain is a business,  and in the last forty years through the ideological privatising, trimming and selling off accumulated national assets and giving subsidies to britain’s and other countries businesses, we’re now in a situation where it’s clear that the establishment MPs who run businesses are realising that running a country for people is a much bigger ‘job’ than they’d realised.

As with Brexit, could investing in the re-enfranchisement of the millions of people who’ve stopped voting and making parliament a place where we really find out what the potential of people in britain is, be the answer?

The total adult population is 53,181,775 (and only 46.8 million are registered to vote).

Where are the seven million and out of the people who did vote, how many didn’t vote for similar reasons to the seven million drop off?

When you look at how even the highly educated and privileged MPs like Michael Gove don’t really understand that parliament is about something bigger than business and ‘just winning’, we need to understand how the process of creating business and supply monsters like Carillion, the gang and agency swedish derogation hostile environment that pitted european workers against british workers, the creation of markets in social care and mental health being a result of disenfranchisement, I think you realise that everyone is a bit stressed out by the market in everything.

Could democracy then, be the thing that embeds the future of the NHS?

Or are we really going to give up on hope and quietly accept the real end of the post war emotional connection between health, class, ethnicity, gender and age, the whole idea of getting better, improving, learning? Are we really happy to go back to a kind of post modern eugenic feudalism that relies on the army and the royal family to distract us and lead us blindly into the privatised units of the care home, the dementia unit, the prison?

Is this all we are as a society?

Be able and be diverse. Be strong and have a diverse outlook: share your knowledge, education, skills so that more people, more of the time can succeed. At the moment, people working in the NHS are pushed into dysfunctional relationships with their vocation, their patients, even their own families or friends and they feel like prisoners.

As Rory Stewart knows, we don’t need more prisoners in our system: we’re currently shining a light on prisoners in jails, on remand and in immigration and detention but there are prisoners of class, gender, ethnicity, age, everywhere: ironically, it’s the anti politically correct environment, the privatisation of everything and body that has led to the detention of UK society in hives of highly segregated marketing information. Marketing information that’s used in health, education, employment, not just lending decisions to determine people’s life chances.  

So prisoners of age, class, gender, ethnicity as well as conscience need the keys to escape their uneccessary detention: how?

The burden on politicians as much as doctors, nurses in hospitals,  is about a vision to communicate with everyone, to re-include, not create markets out of people who have never had the same access to privilege, who have been systematically excluded from work, decent education, housing and opportunities.

Do No Harm.

There have been so many Health Secretaries who have nudged or pushed “the health service” through mincers and processes.

With 1.2million direct employees, 300,000 indirectly employed and 19 commissioning support units you can see the complexity of understanding that really belongs to all of us but has been taken out of local democracy into the ideological roundabout of the managerial emptiness of the ambitious Jeremy Hunt that is held to some account by the passion of the members of the Health and Social Care Select Committee.

We need parliament to become more representative to ensure that developments in important institutions like the NHS also can become more representative, balanced and meaningful.

It’s vital that recruitment and reach of the health service is capable of reciprocity, integration and learning as well as teaching and testing medicines and solutions via technologies.

Whose cutting edge is it anyway? When you really look at the monocultures in the higher medical professions the intakes for higher medical and administrative professionals in the NHS, it’s clear that individuals can’t communicate difference. The structures they’re in, the hives, the cells they’re stuck inside and which are becoming more entrenched with technologies are preventing any sense of difference or a longer, richer and more satisfying understanding of their community and the wider community. We see professions as a cost rather than as a benefit. Because of this skill reciprocity, learning between jobs and professions is never audited as a social good to be used in innovation and development.

What is NHS care? What is a doctor? A surgeon? A Nurse? A Physiotherapist? A Pharmacist? Below you can see the number of occupations in a hospital and if you think about this as a community resource rather than a physical asset you can see how we’re wasting people’s knowledge in the NHS because we’re preventing community development of this resource.

£80 billion of services commissioned. £20 billion for more specialised services. What we don’t realise is that this is working for some of us but not for enough of us enough of the time: we’re not recycling the ideas and the knowledge and the learning because we are stuck in a privilege/underprivilege mindset that needs to be challenged, deepened and enriched.