How can we fix our NHS?

How can we fix our NHS?

By Dark Politricks

With the recent sad story of a World War II hero having to sell his medals to pay for his care in his old age I thought I would write about my own experience with the NHS.

Whilst I have found it to be excellent when you are wheeled in unconscious from an ambulance into accident and emergency, if you have a long term health issue or require non emergency treatment I have found it to be slow, unresponsive and at times down right ridiculous.

Labour tried and failed to introduce a multi-billion pound national health database to be used by all hospitals and doctors surgeries that was then scrapped due to technical and userbility failures amongst various other issues.

As a computer programmer myself I know how easy it could have been to write a system that would be secure, allow enough flexibility for doctors to add new information as well as give patients access to their own health records.

I cannot see why an Internet based system could not be created that had a secure log on for doctors and different levels of security to stop the GP secretary from reading your personal health history. All whilst allowing a doctor at the hospital to add notes and upload scans and files one minute and for them to be instantly accessible by your GP the next.

There is nothing more ridiculous in my eyes than having a scan in the ultra sound department at the hospital then being given a scanned copy of the files and told to walk 50 metres down the hall to another department and hand them over to another doctor. All the while computers sit on top of desks. Does every department within a hospital have it's own IT system? It seems that way and if so why?

If you know me, you will know I have had serious health problems over the last few years and it has certainly been an eye opener for me in how the NHS works.

I have to see multiple doctors all at different locations. From my GP at my local surgery, to consultants at the pain management clinic and the hospital and counselors at other locations.

If one of these doctors recommend a course of treatment or a new drug or examination I have to literally wait weeks whilst the doctor in question writes down the details or dictates into a microphone recorder the details which are then copied to paper. The details are then sent in the post - sometimes only hundreds of metres up the road (I kid you not, one place I visit is less than 200 metres from the hospital!) before arriving at my GP's surgery where it sits until a receptionist opens it and transcribes it into their own local computer system.

If I make an appointment for a month from the initial visit I "might" be lucky enough for the details to appear on my doctors own computer system when I finally get an appointment with her and if not I have to wait another week until they do get transcribed and copied onto their own computer system.

It has got to the stage where I frequently demand that they copy the letter out there and then and I take a physical copy by hand to the other doctor in question rather than wait so long.

On one occasion one doctor wanted to prescribe me a stong pain killer for my pain and I took a hand written copy straight to my GP where she read it and prescribed the drug straight away. If I had left it to the normal method I would have had to wait weeks at the very least.

Apparently email is out of the question due to the legal implications of opening the Royal Mail opposed to intercepting electronic communications. The sentence for the crime of opening the Queens mail is seemingly stronger and that is why they use the post and not email! A basic website as I previously mentioned would do the job - I would even write it for them if they wanted and I wouldn't charge £20 billion for doing so!

Now I respect the NHS, unlike the USA we don't let the poor die due to lack of insurance and we don't expect to pay before we are treated.

We also are not faced with huge crowds of people using the local accident and emergency room as a doctors for minor ailments due to laws that state they cannot turn a patient away. We also don't have to take out huge loans or pay massive chunks of our salary towards health insurance that may OR may not cover you for your current problem.

I'm pretty young, yet I already have a pre-existing condition. That would mean I would have to pay lots to get insured and if I didn't work I don't know what I would do. In fact I would probably already be dead if I couldn't get cheap insurance to cover me.

There have been times I have been jobless and broke. I have also had to go to hospital. How I would have paid for insurance or a large hospital bill I have no idea!

It seems the NHS is screwed.

They have separate procurement services - why don't they bulk buy as a national company and get everything cheaply?

Gordon Brown's PPI may have built lots of nice new hospitals but it has also loaded them up (and the country) up with debt and forced hospitals to use private companies for minor maintenance whereas having a full time odd job man on the pay roll would have been much cheaper in the long run. Instead they have to hire specific companies and pay stupid inflated amounts of money just to change light bulbs - £70 is the figure I have heard.

Our policy of adhering to the hippocratic oath is admirable but it also means we have become a target for health tourists who come halfway across the world to claim expensive medical care paid for by my tax money.

Whilst I lie here in severe pain, waiting months for my next appointment to come through the post someone from another country who hasn't paid tax or even worked towards funding the NHS is taking up resources that should be dedicated to the people who pay for it i.e. you and me.

Our parents and grand parents fought two World Wars to get our social safety net that includes a pension, dole money and a health service. We are supposed to pay for it out of our National Insurance contributions but instead the money has been diverted over the years to fund military campaigns and other huge wastes of tax payers money.

Our National Insurance cards should have to be displayed before any social security and health services are delivered. It doesn't mean we are loaded and have paid in more than a certain amount but it does mean we are a tax paying resident citizen of the UK and entitled through our own and our parents contributions to be put ahead of those who are costing the service billions due to over crowding and health tourism.

Stop paying to have NHS and Social Security leaflets printed up in 20+ languages and for interpreters to be present at the cost of cancer medication to a 90 year old UK citizen.

If we are having doctors making life or death decisions due to cost restrictions then UK nationality should be at the top of the list far above factors such as whether you smoke (and pay billions into the NHS), drink (and do the same) or are obese or unfit.

These are all factors which should be combated before a person gets ill from them and pre-emptive health care is always better than fixing a puncture once your lung or heart goes "pop" anyway. Start young, start at school, stop the kids getting fat and ill in the first place by teaching them how to cook healthy tasty food instead of letting them just go down the chippy at lunch.

The same goes for an "integrated" social care policy. Currently because of the lack of any foresight or planning our hospital beds are merry go rounds for OAP's who are sent home before they are ready and then end up back in hospital within the week. Either that of the lack of proper social care in a home means they stay in hospital beds longer than they should be and deny them from people who require them.

The actual implementation of an integrated travel system, where airports, major train stations and roads are all linked instead of being miles apart would help grow our economy and bring people and wealth to all parts of our country. An integrated health and social care system would prevent the mis-use of hospital resources and stop them being used as replacements for proper social care. The same goes for using prisons as storage facilities for the mentally ill, the homeless and the addicted.

Labours and now the Tories ideas of introducing "internal markets" within the health service is just another foolish way to introduce "privatisation" into something that is owned by the people. It is another area where capitalism is not going to work to drive down costs and deliver better services.

Just like trains that cannot physically run on the same tracks and makes a mockery of true competition on the railways where prices rise every single year. A true market cannot be created in our health system due to the nature of the beast. Are you going to ask the ambulance to go to the nearest hospital when you're having a heart attack or stroke or are you going to risk travelling an extra 20 miles just because another hospital has a better survival rate?

Should we turn our hospitals into shops bidding for our business and send bills out for treatment, putting people into debt to pay for them. Or should we try to cut waste, combine resources and limit the users of our service to those who deserve it, saving money and using it more wisely by reducing managers and back office staff many of who's jobs can be automated.

The number of receptionists at various hospital departments that could be automated with touch screen computers that tell the relevant doctor or consultant you have arrived probably runs into the thousands.

The amount of time and money that is wasted by transcribing notes so that they can be posted when they could be spoken directly into a computer system using speech to text technology probably runs into more than a few thousand per month.

And the cost in stamps or pre-paid postage that could be saved by having a simple website that allows all doctors concerned with your case to see your notes, upload digital screenshots of scans and write comments for other doctors to see probably runs into the millions.

Just by limiting the resources of our precious health service to those who actually deserve it and who own a national insurance card would save millions again. We cannot afford to be the preferred free health care destination for the world.

For those people who don't like the idea of turning away illegal immigrants then private charities and religious organisations can combine their resources to pay for their own hospitals that are open to those who are not national insurance contributers.

There are so many things that could be done to cut waste and automate procedures it wouldn't be hard apart from unions kicking off when jobs are lost due to the cut backs.

However I am tired of waiting 3 months just to get an appointment for a pain removal injection and then wait another month until the actual operation.

I am tired of having to convince one doctor to give me a copy of  their letter to me so I can personally deliver it to another doctor so I don't have to wait a month to get my presecription.

I am fed up of having X-Rays that show something wrong with me but because my GP is on holiday and the locum doesn't know me I am being told to just wait until she comes back whilst kidney stones are causing me imense pain.

I am pissed off at having to spend an hour in the morning trying to get through to my local GP surgery to find that all the appointment slots for the day have gone and that I cannot book an appointment with my GP until next week.

I am seriously fucked off that I am paying for someone who has never worked a day in their life or who has no right to the NHS to enjoy better health care whilst I have to suffer in pain and still go to work to pay for the National Insurance that pays for their treatment.

Our system is certainly not perfect and when compared to the USA I would pick the NHS any day of the week. However we need to sort out the whole system so that it survives into the future and we don't end up turning to a private insurance based system as some kind of fix.

When 90 year old War hero's are having to sell off their medals then something is seriously wrong with our social care system and we need to fix it fast before Cameron and Co chose another war over looking after their citizens health.

 

View the original article "What is happening to our NHS" at Dark Poltricks.

Why is the Vatican going to protect the Pope once he steps down?

Will the Vatican protect the Pope once he steps down?

By Dark Politricks

Question: Why is the Pope going to stay living in the Vatican after he retires?

Answer: Because he is wanted for questioning over his role in covering up the huge sexual abuse of children by Catholic Priests during his time before becoming Pope and could be arrested and charged with crimes regarding these events if he leaves the safety of the Vatican.

According to Reuters it seems that the Vatican is allowing the Pope to remain living inside the Vatican City because of the risk that he will be arrested by any number of the many independent investigative magistrates in Europe over allegations that he deliberately covered up the massive paedophilia scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church for the past decade.

In Europe many countries have a system of law which allows magistrates to bring their own charges against people from any nation if they have broken international law or committed crimes that break the law of their country BUT from within another country.

This is why Dick Cheney and many Israeli politicians cannot visit various places around the world as they face the threat of arrest for war crimes and other breaches of international law such as Torture or the illegal renditioning of citizens from the streets of European cities.

Therefore once the pope leaves the comfort of the Vatican City, which is basically it's own country in the centre of Rome (also called the Holy See), he could face arrest and even imprisonment by any number of activist judges and lawyers who want to bring justice to the thousands of children that were raped and sexually assaulted by Roman Catholic priests across the world.

The child abuse scandal in the Catholic church covers 65 countries, with the amount of victims estimated to be in the tens of thousands (that have come out).

In fact just one survivors' group has over 12,000 members! Imagine all the people who have been sexually assaulted or raped by their local Priest who are yet to make that huge step and go public with their own tale of tragedy and injustice.

The Catholic Church has not been exactly forthcoming when it has come to this scandal even attacking those who have accussed it of a cover up. When the Belgian police started digging around the sexual abuse in their own country the Vatican attacked the tactics used by the Belgian police as "deplorable methods" when they raided a bishops' meeting.

They also dared to compare the investigation of child sex abuse with the practices of communist regimes and called the raid "serious and unbelievable". The Vatican dared trying to play the victim in one of the most widespread sex scandals to hit the modern world.

Pope Benedict XVI was named as a defendant in a 2010 law suit alleging that he failed to take action as a cardinal in 1995 when he was allegedly told about a priest who had abused boys at a U.S. school for the deaf decades earlier.

The lawyers withdrew the case last year and the Vatican said it was a major victory that proved the pope could not be held liable for the actions of abusive priests. However whilst he remains Pope he also remains head of state and the head of the Catholic church which offers protection in the eyes of many countries.

Once he steps down from this position it leaves him vulnerable to any law suit that may be filled against him. Could this be the reason that the Pope plans to remain living within the Vatican after stepping down?

Although the pope is not currently named in other cases the Vatican is not ruling out the possibility that new charges could be brought once he leaves his position as head of the Church.

The Vatican said:

"If he lived anywhere else then we might have those crazies who are filing lawsuits, or some magistrate might arrest him like other (former) heads of state have been for alleged acts while he was head of state."

Even if he leaves the Vatican he is still safe within Italy as the 1929 Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Holy See, which created the Vatican City as it's own sovereign state, has said the Vatican City would be "invariably and in every event considered as neutral and inviolable territory". Therefore the only risk seems to be if the Pope, once de-throned, leaves the safety of the Italian shores.

Since the revelations of a massive cover up of sexual abuse and paedophilia across the world by Roman Catholic Priests, from the massive amounts of abuse in Ireland to the claims from America and other European nations there have been constant calls for the Popes arrest and his involvement in covering it up by moving priests accuses of sexual crimes to new dioceses.

When he was serving as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer he is accused of covering up for Priests accused of sex crimes and that not only did those Priests not face internal discipline the relevant information was not passed to civilian authorities so that they could deal with the accusations properly.

Before taking the role of the Pope, Benedict was head of the Vatican's main doctrinal arm called "the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" which was in charge of all investigations by the Vatican into claims of abuse by Priests worldwide.

Senior church official's have already admitted in 2010 that a German archdiocese had made "serious mistakes" in handling an abuse case while the Benedict was serving as its archbishop. A priest who was accused of molesting boys was given therapy instead of being arrested and later was allowed to resume pastoral duties before committing further abuse and finally being prosecuted for his sexual crimes.

He is also accused of failing to act over complaints during the 1990s about a priest in the USA who is thought to have abused almost 200 deaf boys!

According to Church and Vatican documents an archbishop wrote letters to Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996 calling for disciplinary proceedings against Fr Lawrence Murphy who is believed to have molested some 200 boys at St John's School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, between 1950 and 1974.

Apparently he assaulted the boys whilst hearing their confessions, in his office, in his car, in their dormitory beds and even at his mother's house!

An internal trial authorised by Cardinal Ratzinger's deputy was halted after the accused priest asked the future pope to halt proceedings and to allow him live out the remainder of his time in the "dignity of my priesthood". Despite objections from a second archbishop the priest was moved to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes and schools.

There was also the massive cover up of sexual abuse by Irish priests over decades which recently came to light. The Pope condemned these abuses as a "heinous crime" as well as a "grave sin" however one Irish priest has admitted to abusing more than 100 children, while another confessed that he had abused minors systematically and regularly over a period of 25 years.

Therefore the Pope has a lot to answer for and he currently heads the worlds most organised and powerful paedophilia ring which seems to be able to sit above international law through the Vatican basically being it's own country.

So it doesn't take too much brain power to work out that the aging Pope might be scared of being arrested by an activist judge somewhere in Europe who could already be sitting at an airport waiting for George W Bush to land so he can pounce on him and arrest him for the war in Iraq which many people still consider an illegal crime.

If international law is to mean anything then just as the heads of state from Bosnia are currently facing criminal charges in the International Criminal Court for war crimes during the break up of Yugoslavia and the ex President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, has proved that being a head of state does not grant you immunity from international justice it is only logical that once the Pope resumes life as a normal citizen he will become a target for those looking to add international sex rings to the list of crimes that leaders of states can be charged with at the Hague.

View the original article "Why is the Vatican shielding the Pope from arrests over sexual abuse?" at www.darkpolitricks.com.

Why UK Police posing as dead children shows us that the UK justice system is as corrupt as it always has been

Why UK Police posing as dead children shows us that the UK justice system is as corrupt as it always has been

By Dark Politricks

It comes as no surprise to me that recent revelations by the Guardian newspaper reveal that police in the UK have been stealing the identities of dead children for over 40 years and then using them to infiltrate protest groups undercover. It is just one more crime in a long list of UK police breaking the law for their own ends.

I have no doubt that there are probably "dead children" sitting in Occupy meetings all over the UK at this very moment. 

If I was a member of any protest group I would be straight onto the nearest birth certificate and death registry to see who was actually real and who was an undercover cop posing as a dead kid.

Not only is "Identity Theft" a crime that the UK police is "cracking down on" whilst at the same time engaging it in themselves. It comes on the back of a long list of other crimes which shows once again that it's one rule for us and another for those that govern and keep us in control.

We have just had the "Plebgate" row in which Downing Street police not only lied about what Andrew Mitchell a government minister said to them whilst trying to ride his bike out of the street but colluded by making false statements, pretending to be civilians who had seen the incident, to get him sacked.

A Dispatches report on Channel 4 tonight will go over the whole story again now that we know the Police were the ones in the wrong not the Chief Whip.

As Andrew Mitchell will say in the programme:

"I was caught between the pincers of the police on the one hand and the media on the other in a way that would lead you to believe that the Leveson Inquiry had never even taken place."
"I think that was completely wrong and it led to my demise."

Four arrests have since been made under the investigation into the incident which led to Mr Mitchell resigning.

Then as Andrew Mitchell just said himself we have just had the Leveson Inquiry in which we were told of a long history of collusion between the mainstream media and bent cops who would pass on information for a price. Policeman selling details of celebrities activities or even current murder investigations - well I suppose they have to make their "bonus" money somehow.

It's not as if the Tories aren't being the party of "law and order" they have always historically acted as.

Just recently the Justice Minister Chris Grayling spoke out on UK prison reform. He wants to restore UK prisons to the times of the 80's, before PlayStations and TV's in prison cells, where the only thing that kept the prisoners from rioting was the block awash with heroin and other drugs and slopping out was still the norm.

It was conditions like these during the 80's and early 90's that riots at UK prisons were a normal TV news story.

How would you like to shit in a bucket and keep it in your cell all night until you get given the "chance" to empty it?

They seem to have forgotten that it was only the high availability of drugs on the wings that kept prisoners content and so doped up they couldn't light a toilet roll if they wanted to. Even the heads of prisons realised this and turned a blind eye to it.

The most common way for drugs to get into prisons is not by dead pigeons over fence walls or visiting time but by bent prison guards smuggling them in for the prisoners. 

This has been known for ages.

Now that drugs are much harder to get in due to sniffer dogs, scanning chairs and tighter searches on visitors prisoners are instead doped up on methadone, anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. 

However this is no way to subdue a locked up population and if the Tories think they can take away the tools that keep prisoners in line without a few riots they must be kidding themselves.

Don't they realise we don't have the money to keep rebuilding the prisons after they all get trashed again?

Or do they just expect the prisoners to sit in their cells 23 hours a day with nothing to do but build up rage until they get the chance to vent it on the wing at guards and other prisoners?

It's almost as if the Tories have forgotten about Strangeways in which a prisoner was killed, 147 prison officers and 47 prisoners were injured and £55 million pounds worth of damage was done to the prison during the 25 day riot - the longest in UK history during 1990 and one which led to the last massive reform of our prison system.

Back outside though the police have a long history of bending the rules and going in mob handed when they think they can get away with it.

Who can forget the assassination of Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube after the bombings of 2005. An innocent man gunned down my multiple police officers all due to a cop taking a piss and missing him exiting his house, causing a massive and horrendous case of mis-identification.

Then we have all the recent crimes committed by police during protests such as the London G20 protests. In which PC  Simon Harwood killed Ian Tomlinson after he died a short while after being struck, hands in pockets, by Simon's truncheon.

The policeman has just recently been sacked after being found guilty of gross misconduct by a disciplinary panel even thought he was cleared in court over the killing.

Even though our cops hide their identifying badge numbers - supposedly not allowed, and hit, batter and spray protesters with CS gas we now must wonder which of the protesters on the other side are also cops masquerading as real activists.

We have always known that cops went undercover and infiltrated left, and anti-establishment leaning protest groups and even on occasion acted as agent provocateurs.

Sometimes, even the under cover cops get too carried away with their assignment and switch sides like the recent case of PC Mark Kennedy who destroyed a trial by offering to give evidence on the campaign group he had infiltrated's behalf. 

Here was a true agent provocateur who had infiltrated a green protest movement and helped out on numerous protests. How many "crimes" was he allowed to get away with all in the name of "policing" protest groups?

And that is only just a few years in a long history of UK police behaving more like criminals than the officers of the law they are supposed to be.

I could give you numerous personal stories of police brutality, policemen taking drugs openly, stealing property and other illegal activities but then so could many others.

Just remember - our police are not all bent as nine bob notes but a large majority seem to be "allowed" to do as they please for reasons unknown to the common man who would be banged up for similar activities.

So if you are waking up this morning as a member of a protest group I would be looking around and wondering to myself "how many of my supposed friends are really policemen using dead children's identities?"

And if you do get nicked by one of your "dead cop friends" then just remember - "no comment all the way!".

View the original article on "Cops posing as dead children just shows how the UK justice system is as corrupt as it always has been" at www.darkpolitricks.com