Welsh NHS overspend Must end - Warning
Five months into the new Fiscal year and we still do not have the figures for the amount of overspend for last year. As this perpetual tale of money-wasting only seems to affect the NHS, I really do wonder why the true figures are hidden from us in this Machiavellian way.
We've just had the supposedly joyous news that the 'War on Drunks is saving the NHS Millions' - well, almost £7m we are told. Almost ??? - here we go again - imprecise figures for 'good news', yet no news - after threatening that 'heads will roll' if the LHBs fail to meet their budget targets. So, how the blazes are we supposed to give any credibility to any warning given by the Auditor General, Huw Vaughan Thomas, who appears to be 'champing at the bit' after his summer hols ?
He does say that a "Health Boards have developed an expectation that they would be 'bailed out' by our Welsh government if they overspent their means. But, this master of the 'after event' statements of the 'purely-bloody-obvious' can only whimper to A.Ms that "More discipline was needed to manage budgets if this cycle was to broken", So I ask,
What bloody budgets - we haven't been told what they are so why tell us that they're always overspent ?? Also, "this discipline must be brought in from the start of the year" from which we may reasonably deduce that the healthcare we may expect in future will be limited to what's left in the £500bn+ pot.
Alas, we don't know how much of the pot is given to which service, so we have no way of telling which specialities are overspent or, in reality how much they were underfunded when the annual need is supposed to be a 'given'. Perplexing isn't it - but what does it matter - every family will have excess numbers so shouldn't mind donating at least one relative to the cause of cutting funds (LoL)
May I remind everyone - AGAIN - that the health service is not a profit or loss organisation. It is, in fact, and organisation that exists to meet our health needs dependent on what those needs are. Of course, if the NHS continues to fail in assessing those needs, how can they provide the resources necessary to deal with this need ? Really it's as stupid as trying to say "The M6 is no longer profitable, so we're going to cut it off at Coventry, leaving you a cross country trip to Manchester, for instance".
Clearly, all this nonsense has to stop, and key people like the Auditor General ought to back up everything he says with the factual figures, instead of assuming that we're all too stupid to know what's going on. I'm not joking when I say that our government is almost on the same wavelength as extremist terrorists - keeping us in a permanent state of fear in order to suppress our enquiring minds.
'Discipline', that's what the Auditor General said, and that what's happening to us - we're all being disciplined, instead of our incompetent government, who have consistently shown that they are not 'Fit for purpose'.
Incidentally, fear runs through the corridors of UHW today as it has been discovered that 380+ staff are to go A.S.A.P., which kinds of throws a spanner in the 'Improve the caring nurses' approach, doesn't it ? R. W.
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