The hospital in question is an NHS hospital i.e. run directly by the British state as basically all hospitals are. The NHS does occasionally rent out surgical spaces to the private sector but the UK private health care sector is comparatively tiny, and the hospital itself is still run by the government. In this case however the family weren't private clients so the whole thing was state run end to end.
> The hospital in question is an NHS hospital i.e. run directly by the British state as basically all hospitals are.
That's not how the English NHS works. The hospitals are run by NHS trusts. This particular hospital is run by King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
An NHS Foundation Trust is a "public benefit corporation". This means it's a business, with a chief executive, a chair, and a unitary board of executive and non-executive directors. The organisation is primarily accountable to their local population.
I know the NHS is complex, but when you say stuff like this it just shows that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
> In this case however the family weren't private clients so the whole thing was state run end to end.
No, this is nonsense. It's clearer to see in cancer services, but a lot of stuff is provided via MacMillan charitable funding.
The NHS is in no way run by anything even resembling corporations, come on. The fact that they use job titles taken from the private sector is irrelevant - lots of places in the civil service do that. All you've done is describe the names they use to refer to different departments of the government.
I mean your whole post seems confused about what the private sector actually is. A government department doesn't become private sector because it gets money from charities!
As for accountable, read the full article and see what NHS accountability looks like. It looks like nothing. "Lessons must be learned", indeed!
> The NHS is in no way run by anything even resembling corporations, come on.
What? Of course it is. This hospital trust has its own budget, it has a board of directors, they're not controlled by local government, they're not controlled by central government, they're not controlled by civil servants, they're accountable to their local population before central government. Here's their annual report from 2020/2021. https://www.kch.nhs.uk/Doc/corp%20-%20684.7%20-%20annual%20r...
What's the difference between the chief executive of an NHS Foundation Trust and the chief executive of any other corporation?
You seem to think this hospital is controlled directly by the Department for Health and Social Care, and that's simply incorrect.
I've written a more detailed and thoughtful reply that covers this to your other post, but briefly, from your document:
"On 2 April 2020, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England and NHS Improvement announced reforms to the NHS cash regime for the 2020/21 financial year. During 2020/21 existing DHSC interim revenue and capital loans as at 31 March 2020 of £735m were extinguished and replaced with the issue of Public Dividend Capital (PDC)"
The NHS is a government department as are all aspects of it. These organizations rely near totally on taxpayer funding, therefore, they are a part of the government. The fact that they claim to be independent is meaningless obfuscation and frankly the prevalence of this practice throughout the UK government is an indictment of the public sector culture there.
The idea they are independent of central government is especially bizarre. Read the report:
"Following a financially challenging 2017/18, the Trust was placed in Financial Special Measures on 11 December 2017 for breach of its NHS Provider Licence, having been in enhanced oversight for some years before that. Enforcement undertakings were issued in February 2018 and updated in
August 2018."
They were placed (by the government) in "special measures" because they aren't a real company and therefore cannot just go bankrupt like a real company would, this happened because they breached their (government issued) NHS license, and therefore enforcement undertakings were issued (by the government).
These are government controlled bureaucracies being held to account by other parts of the government. They are certainly not independent of that government at any level, nor are they in any way directly accountable to the people using their hospitals.
Given your familiarity with NHS jargon I have to wonder if you work for the NHS, or at least very closely with it. If so, is this belief that the NHS somehow isn't the government widespread?
You're using a definition of "run by the government" that is both bizarre but also does not fit the NHS.
This belief that the NHS is not run by the government isn't a belief, it's fact, as you'd know if you'd read the legislation.
Your comments about putting a trust into special measures - not allowing it to go bankrupt - has nothing to do with it being run by the government or not, it's about protecting patients. There are plenty of providers of NHS services that do go bankrupt.
It's okay that you don't understand the NHS - it's a complex tangle of organisations. It's less okay that you insist that your poor understanding is The Truth. Genuinely weird that you accept that I know more about the NHS than you, but on this one point I must be wrong.
Like what? The NHS is basically entirely state run. Yes, they buy supplies and equipment from the private sector - they don't literally smelt their own sand into silicon - but the NHS employs all the staff, they own and maintain the buildings, they buy all the drugs and equipment. Private sector involvement in British healthcare is minimal. Literally every single person in the story about this poor girl is a state employee.
And that is why this tragedy happened. The outcomes here are terrible but exactly what you'd expect and what the NHS's critics have been saying for decades. Talk to people who used to live in the Soviet Union and you'll hear stories indistinguishable from this one. There are people and equipment there, in theory the ingredients for success are available, but nobody seems to care about the results. So the system steadily degrades into ever more dysfunctional states, the problems are obvious to everyone who interacts with the system and yet it cannot/will not improve.
This is exactly the reason communism failed and now the NHS is failing in the exact same way, for the exact same reasons. It's not even a new set of problems, it's just that the state of collapse is now so bad that even the most ideological people (e.g. Guardian editors) are starting to open up about it.
Sadly this poor woman is still a long way from being able to understand what happened to her family. Her conclusion at the end of the article is "don't blindly trust doctors, research things on the internet and speak out". Yeah, and then what? She was already doing those things and the doctors/nurses were ignoring her. Patients in the NHS are totally disempowered. It's not like a private sector system where you have options and could go to a competitor. If the doctors aren't diagnosing your child's problem properly because they're WFH then, well, you're just screwed: the child is going to die and the resulting investigation will be a whitewash in which the doctors who messed up the worst get promoted. That's what happens when you have one state run system for everyone.
What are you talking about? I live in the US and private health care is garbage. My doctor's are picked by my job(in network). I have had my insurance company flat out refuse to cover tests my doctor recommended. Or force me to try cheaper options that my doctor doesn't think will work but I have no choice but to waste time. I pay a fortune every month for the privilege of paying 4500 a year. This is the best plan my job offers.
Before you say just find a new job. I'm tired of looking for a new job because the insurance started getting worse at a company.
It doesn't matter which doctor I see it won't change what insurance decides.
You have a system in which health insurance is tied to your job because of tax breaks created by Congress i.e. state intervention! It's not a normal or natural way for private health care to evolve. I have private health care and my policy is my own, not connected to my job, for example, and that's pretty typical outside the USA.
Your insurance company may sometimes refuse to pay for tests recommended by your doctor because neither you nor your doctor are directly paying for tests so the insurers are the only parties whose job is to push back on over-testing. The USA is famously considered an over-tested and over-medicalized society in general so arguably they could do a lot more of such pushbacks. If you do some research and think that in your case they're overshooting, then you need a different health plan. The fact that you can't get one due to the job tie is indeed a really broken aspect of US healthcare, and the fix is to fix the tax code so there's no benefit to having employers pay the premiums.
