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Just caught up with another excellent post from Mike Denham over at Burning our Money. He has been taking a look at the latest annual report from the Healthcare Commission. Or, to lapse into today’s mandatory quango-jargon, and use the official title, the “Annual Healthcheck”.

Problem is, a lot of people are taken in. British citizens want to believe in the excellence of the NHS, the excellence of their NHS. The government has poured more money into healthcare ergo healthcare has improved. It must have, mustn’t it? And so, when NHS BLOG DOCTOR says that it is all dishonest propaganda, that the NHS is providing a level of care worse than it has ever been, worse beyond all imagining, there are howls of anguish and disbelief. How dare you suggest that the NHS is anything other than wonderful? How can a doctor who purports to believe in the ideals of the NHS dare to criticise it?

Junior doctors are not getting the experience they need. Real nursing care has disappeared. Elderly patients are dying of malnutrition or hospital acquired infections because there is no one to feed and clean them. Paramedics are pressurised into not taking critically ill patients into hospital. GPs are to be “incentivised” to keep sick patients at home. The de-skilling and dumbing-down gathers momentum. It is, I suspect, already unstoppable. The protocol-driven target culture “empowers” (as the government would say) unskilled workers to appear to do jobs which are in reality beyond their competence.

And so it goes on.

I have been “round the houses” so many times on so many issues that I lose the will to live. Hence the prolonged blogging break.

Meanwhile, the boxes continue to be ticked, the targets are hit, and so all is well in the world of healthcare.