The Golden Strawberry

Or so says this article by erstwhile Observer health columnist Jo Revill:

By the time Tony Blair went to visit St Thomas' hospital in February 2000... doctors warned that he was too ambitious, that he was crazy to imagine they would ever be able to meet the target of an 18-month waiting list.

An 18-month wait ... is that even imaginable now? Of course not. The current target, which the health service will meet later this year, is for no one to be waiting for more than three months for anything at all, a colossal achievement, but one which seems invisible. The transformation in the last five to six years in health care is real and palpable, a result of extra money but also reorganisation, accompanied by the introduction of some controversial reforms.

...A survey for the NHS by the independent Picker Institute of 80,000 patients across 167 hospitals showed that 91 per cent of people feel the care in the NHS is good or excellent.

If BT or Thames Water had a 91 per cent satisfaction rating, they would be besides themselves with joy. And new figures from the Department of Health show that in the year up to March 2007, 98.2 per cent of the 18.9 million people who attended England's A&E departments were seen, diagnosed and treated within four hours.

So how come everyone thinks the NHS is doing so badly then? Economist Andrew Dilnot puts it rather nicely:

When you go into a hospital, you don't automatically think: 'How lucky I am not to have undergone this hip operation 10 years ago, when the wait would have been two years and my surgeon would not have been as well trained.'

Perhaps it is also possible to blame our health minister, who comes across as being so awfully patronising you don't want to listen to her go on about how well the NHS is doing. Instead you'd rather gouge your eyes out with a rusty spoon.

And yes, there are still problems - MRSA, the junior doctors' fiasco etc etc. But compare the NHS with ten years ago, and there's quite a bit of difference. If you have a heart attack after realising just how good the NHS is, at least you'll be treated quickly and efficiently by our health service. And that can't be a bad thing.

Cory

...Which is chronicled here.

Bringing in 24-hour drinking. Marvellous.

Now I know the nanny state et al is not good, but surely we should not allow people the freedom to drink themselves stupid? These statistics really are shocking, if not altogether surprising, as said by one Doctor in the article:

Hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease more than doubled in a decade, reaching 35,400 in 2004/5. Alcoholic liver disease deaths increased by 37%.

Admissions for alcoholic poisoning increased to 21,700 from 13,600 over the same 10-year period.

The Information Centre report also highlights England's binge and underage drinking problem.

Nearly one in four secondary school children aged 11-15 reported that they had drunk alcohol in the past week when surveyed in 2005.

The average amount of alcohol consumed by this age group doubled between 1990 and 2000 and currently remains at 10.4 units (or about 10 small glasses of wine or five pints of beer) per week.

Young adults are the most likely to binge drink - a third of men and a quarter of women aged 16-24 said they had drunk more than double the recommended number of units on one day of the previous week, typically Saturday, when surveyed in 2004.

Not sure what the answer is (higher taxes, possibly?) but it definitely is NOT relaxing opening hours.

-posted by Roy

The front page of today's Independent is good news for liberals everywhere. It's about time this country had a sensible policy on drugs. At the moment, the establishment is more concerned at jailing those drug addicts who commit offences, rather than rehabilitating them, and getting them to kick their habit. This policy does not work, as addicts go out of prison still addicted to various drugs and steal (or whatever) to fund their drug habit!

In Zurich, the Indy reports, a more liberal drugs policy has seen use of heroin fall by 82%. This is because heroin is now seen as a "loser" drug, rather than a cool thing to do. By 2002, the number of heroin addicts in Zurich had fallen to 150 by 2002.

In the UK, there are 56, 000 heroin addicts, and an estimated 200, 000 users. And do you know how many heroin addicts there were before the drug here was criminalised, because of fears that it was addictive? Forty-seven.

I don't take drugs myself. Apart from tea, and a few choice musicians. But for the drug addicts there are, the broad policies of those enacted in Switzerland should be implemented here, so that they can turn their lives around. We need more liberal, lenient sentences and more rehabilitation for drug addicts; not more pandering to the right-wing press.

-posted by Roy

A good post by Norm on the bill concerning assisted suicide, which was blocked by the Lords, but will return in six months. It examines the letter by Dr. Rowan Williams, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, and Sir Johnathan Sacks. I can't add much to it, as his arguments seem flawless to me. I will, however, comment on the following sentence in the cleric's letter. It forms part of argument 2) on Norm's post.

Such a Bill cannot guarantee that a right to die would not, for society’s most vulnerable, become a duty to die.

That is not what the Bill is about. It allows patients who wish to end their suffering and die early to do so. It does not, and should not, force patients to sign away their life if they do not want to. A "slippery slope" towards people having a duty to die should be avoided at all costs.

The Bill will resurface in six months, and I hope it will finally be approved. Popular opinion has been consisently in favour of such a bill for the last decade or so.

-posted by Roy

Excellent news for those who want to see proper regulation of drugs here. Small steps maybe - you can only possess small amounts of heroin, pot and cocaine legally - but important all the same.

Certainly a heroic thing for the Mexicans to do, especially with the US breathing down their necks with their ridiculous and hypocritical 'War on Drugs'. Perhaps this will mark the beginning of sanity in Western policy towards narcotics?  

-posted by Adam