Cicero's Songs

"There's a difference between information and knowledge. It's the difference between Christy Turlington's phone number and Christy Turlington ." P.J. O'Rourke This week The BBC Radio "Today Programme" is examining the results of the large increase in Health expenditure that was initiated in 2000 when Tony Blair committed his government to match the average spend across the European Union. As they note, over the past seven years total health spending across the UK has increased by 2% of GDP ans is now approximately 9.3% of GDP, while cash spend by the NHS alone has more than doubled - by around £55 billion. Unfortunately, this has not resulted in a dramatic increase in the speed or quality of patient care. Examining how the money is spent: They show a detailed breakdown of the £19 billion cash increase in spending for the hospital and community health services part of the English NHS from 2004/5 to 2007/8. It is not possible to put together nati...

Ah! In December a young Prime Minister's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of spin. The gigantic deficits in the British health care system are reinforcing a need to rationalise services on fewer sites. The problem is that closing hospital services is always deeply unpopular in the the communities they serve. When the services under threat are Accident and Emergency- then campaigns are tinged with the fear that A&E services might be too far away and that lives may be lost. Whether road accidents or heart attacks- people get nervous about closures. So Mr. Blair is making a pre-emptive strike - arguing that those who oppose the closures are putting lives at risk. I have no idea whether Mr. Blair believes this, or whether he merely finds it expedient to believe this- in any event the evidence is somewhat finely balanced. However the concentration of sick people in one place strikes me as potentially quite dangerous. Today we have MRSA- what happens tomorrow if H5N1 becomes transmis...

For some time there have been growing concerns about the cost of the new NHS centralised information system . The latest estimates are truly staggering: £31 billion. What kind of a mindset creates such a behemoth? Why is it required that the system should be centralised? It is almost as though the Ministers forgot that the internet exists- it is totally unnecessary to centralise patient information to this absurd degree. While there might be concerns over the security of the links, these apply just as much to a centralised system - and curing the problem would not take £31 billion. A system that re-invents the wheel to solve a problem that does not really exist- that is typical of Whitehall. Meanwhile Microsoft has also managed to lay an egg, in the shape of its new Vista operating system - a system that has taken an enormous amount of centralised brain power to develop. Yet no one else will ever do the same. Again, the answer is the internet- linking simple units together creates fa...