Who Pays The Price When the Watchdog is Put Down?

It's a sad day for the people of Stafford who've lost friends and relatives who had the misfortune to be patients at the town's hospital over the past few years. The Healthcare Commission estimates that 400 more people died there between 2005 and 2008 than would normally be expected - as this BBC news story explains.

I wonder what Alan Milburn thought when he heard the news? Milburn it was who promoted the abolition of local Community Health Councils, which had the right to visit and inspect local hospitals, and report on their findings. Since they disappeared in 2003, responsibility for local monitoring passed to Patients Forums (which took a year or two to set up and begin working even reasonably effectively) and then, more recently, to Local Involvement Networks (LINks).

During all this re-disorganisation, local NHS managers have effectively had free rein to pursue their policies without interference from pesky people from the community. What has happened at Stafford shows how disastrous such freedom can be. I can't help feeling that a few visits to Stafford Hospital by CHC members (if they still existed) would have spotted such alarming signs as patients who were dehydrated drinking from flower vases...

At least the Healthcare Commission got onto them - in the end. But the Commission is a national body, and can't keep their eye on the ball in every locality.

Feeling thirsty, Alan? Better pour yourself a Pepsi...

A Family Man

Say what you will about Bill Blunt, but there are few people in the world he would hesitate to urinate on if they were on fire. Common human decency, together with a bladder that’s not as functional as it used to be, mean I would rarely pass up an opportunity to extinguish the flames if a fellow human being were suffering in anguish while being burned alive.

There’s always an exception that proves the rule, however. In the case of the Honourable Member for Darlington, I’d keep my legs well and truly crossed.

What can be said about Alan Milburn that hasn’t already been said? He started out his political career working in a Socialist bookshop in Newcastle, peddling Marxist tracts to anyone who accidentally stepped over the threshold of Days of Hope - rising, inexorably, to a place in Tory Blair’s cabinet as Secretary of State for Health. Whilst in office, he oversaw the introduction of the so-called Private Finance Initiative – for which read letting the private sector construct hospitals, which they’d then lease back to the NHS at huge cost to the public purse.

In a little-appreciated annexe to his career, he also abolished Community Health Councils, the last vehicle for democratic influence in the health service (which, for more than a quarter of a century, had kept the worst excesses of NHS managers in check).

As Wikipedia so succinctly summarises:

“Following his resignation as Secretary of State for Health (to spend more time with his family) [in June 2003] Alan Milburn took a post for £30,000 a year as an adviser to Bridgepoint Capital, a venture capital firm heavily involved in financing private health care firms moving into the NHS, including Alliance Medical, Match Group, Medica and Robina Care Group.”

Whatever Milburn’s real motives may have been, his family clearly thought better of them since, in September 2004, he returned to Blair’s government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – a role he renounced once Gordon Brown was appointed as Prime Minister in June 2007. Since then, he’s continued as a constituency MP for Darlington. He might have gained some solace when he accepted Pepsico’s offer of a £25,000 a year ‘to attend a handful of meetings and offer advice on health, nutrition and the company's "strategic direction"’.

Now, it's been 'reveled' (sic) that Milburn has been invited to head up a ‘new commission’ on social mobility. We can only presume that Gordon Brown would much prefer Mr Milburn to be inside his tent, rather than outside.

Now, there’s a tent I’d rather not be near to if it was on fire...