GOOD READS FOR 2015
From TOR RAVEN
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From MALCOLM BLAIR-ROBINSON
These two mega thrillers are a must for those who love historical drama and political intrigue.
It depends how you look at it. Nine out of ten people seen and treated in timely fashion (is a four hour wait timely?) or targets missed with the lowest performance for ten years. Or the best of all those which keep records in Europe. Of course the fact is if things were truly efficient there would be no statistics because there would be no noticeable wait. And GPs would have a system, as they used to, when one of them was always on duty 24/7. Care in the community would still be still functional (remember the District Nurse?).
But when people come on TV to tell how loved ones waited hours for an ambulance, when patients are not just kept waiting on trolleys in corridors, but before they even get to that are kept queuing in ambulances in the hospital forecourt, when hospital after hospital declares a major incident because it cannot cope, it is clear that something has gone badly wrong. Politically, whatever the cause, it is a disaster for the Tories, whose reforms are widely seen as a costly time waste and whose cuts to social care are said by many to be at the heart of the problem.
For Ed Milliband, who decided to launch Labour’s election campaign with the NHS at the centre of it, this vindication of his warnings gives him an edge. In a perverse way it is a lucky break. Ed may be geeky and bad at eating in public, but if he is lucky, then that could count for a lot. As for Osborne, the master political strategist who was widely thought to have won the first day of the election campaign for the Tories, he must wonder how this advance was reversed to a rout on the second.