A Little bit of Exercise…. & The Health Economy

Keen eyed readers may have realised from yesterday’s blog that I had a case of the blues; indeed the whole household was suffering from it. I think that it was the normal start of year thing. Well there was a danger that this would hangover to today, so what did we do, we went to the gym, and both of us undertook a good quality hour on the various machines. At the end of the exercise we were both glowing.

The effect did not stop there though. We accomplished so much today, all of it mundane but it really made a difference to the house and we both fell so cheerful. I think the moral of this is obvious.

While on the cross trainer at the gym the rolling news was dominated by the perceived crisis in the country’s hospitals, indeed some of the reports were from our local hospital. I was depressed on a number of fronts. I listened to the Medical Director of a health region talk about their solution to the issue on national radio. He said that they had formed a transformation committee to examine the health economy. Now firstly given the platform of national radio he spoke gobbledygook, and if he thought that this was the answer to the problem then he I think is the problem.

The Minister of Health was interviewed on the radio this morning and referred directly to Scarborough Hospital, where he said 1000 additional nurses and 300 doctors had been employed in the last five years. Well this struck me as a huge exaggeration, indeed a downright untruth, but he was not called to account. Now I have an anecdote about our current Minister of Health from his previous job at the Ministry of Culture. On an enforced stopover I had a conversation with a senior person in the UK opera world. He said that the minister had trouble comprehending the issues of the Royal Opera House. Now I am not a musician or a doctor but it strikes me that the Opera House is a hell of a lot simpler than the Health Service. This together with his misspeak does not fill me with confidence.

Was today the governments Denis Healy moment, for those of you with a long memory he was quoted when the IMF was about to be highly critical of the British Economy he said “Crisis, what crisis”. The government’s reaction to the hospital issue was to deny it and say that the UK was still performing better than comparable health services. Well that maybe the case but denial is always a risky policy. As usual it is not the crisis that the government will be remembered for but the way it handled it. It is always the cover-up that gets them.