RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Latest plan to avoid wasting the NHS? Send within the clowns

While Keir Starmer talks about ‘re-imagining’ the NHS, medical researchers have discovered a novel method for reducing recovery times:

Send in the clowns.

Seriously-ill children in hospital with pneumonia responded more quickly to treatment if they were visited by ‘medical clowns’ twice a day.

After being entertained at their bedsides with music and laughter, they needed a third fewer antibiotics and could be discharged within 43.5 hours, compared with three days for the average pneumonia patient.

The findings, based on a trial in Israel, were presented to a prestigious European medical conference and no doubt are already being studied closely by NHS chiefs.

With the health service under pressure to cut waiting times and free up hospital beds, it can only be a matter of time before a similar scheme is adopted here.

Holby City will resemble something from Billy Smart’s Circus, with Ronald McDonald lookalikes prat-falling and flinging hospital-food custard pies at each other.

Patients suffering from dehydration will be supplied with drinking water dispensed from a giant flower on a clown’s lapel.

Think I’m joking? When it happens, remember you read it here first. The NHS is in thrall to the latest gimmicks, whether that involves sending patients to line-dancing classes or issuing herrings on prescription to cut the number of heart attacks. (Yes, really.)

This week’s money-no-object plan is to give fashionable Ozempic-style weight-loss jabs to children as young as six. It would be much cheaper to send in the clowns.

Health service bureaucrats are always looking for the next best thing, rather than attending to the basics. They climb on any passing bandwagon to offer an ever-expanding range of expensive, non-essential treatments.

Meanwhile, the original purpose of the NHS gets lost in the flood as waiting lists hit seven million, cancer patients go undiagnosed and A&E is overwhelmed daily.

In his new report on the NHS, former health minister and surgeon Lord Darzi warns that the health service is in a ‘critical condition’. Hospitals are doing less work despite being given more money.

Survival rates from cancers in our ‘world-class’ NHS are lagging way behind those in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S.

Routine appointments are cancelled at the last minute, it’s almost impossible to get a same-week, let alone same-day GP appointment, and A&E is a war zone.

A relative of mine recently had major, life-prolonging surgery. After a week recuperating on a post-op ward, they were discharged. The hospital needed the bed and they were happy to be home.

(I’m using ‘they’ not in the trans sense, but because I’ve chosen not to disclose their identity.)

A few days later, there were complications. I’ll spare you the gory details, but they had to be re-admitted. Arriving back at hospital, they were forced to sit in a wheelchair for 15 hours and only offered a single hot drink before being ‘assessed’.

This was at a hospital in East Anglia, but it could have been anywhere. You come across similar stories several times every day.

A couple of weeks ago, I rang an old mate of mine for a catch-up. When he answered his mobile, it turned out he was in Bristol hospital after being admitted with kidney problems. He was on a trolley in a corridor and had been there for the past eight hours.

Listen to any radio phone-in, or scan a newspaper letters page and you will be bombarded with similar, horrifying tales. These are not exceptions, they’re the rule.

So when Starmer says the NHS is at a crossroads and must reform or die, he’s not kidding. But, I wouldn’t hold your breath, apart from Wes Streeting’s welcome plans for more local involvement in primary care – especially our excellent pharmacies, many of whom are now threatened with being forced out of business because of NHS parsimony

Good luck with that, Wes. We’ve lost more than 1,000 independent dispensing pharmacies since 2017.

No government, and certainly not this incompetent, arrogant, far-Left Labour rabble, will grasp the nettle, admit that the 1940s nationalised model is kaput and move to more efficient, mixed, insurance-based provision.

There’s not another country on earth with a health service which replicates our ‘world-class’ NHS. Or would dream of so doing.

(I can only speak for the exemplary care my late mum received under the much-maligned American system, which saved her life and extended it by almost 15 years.)

Yet politicians of all stripes are frightened to do anything about the NHS other than tinker at the margins.

Starmer is long on rhetoric but short on genuine reform. Most of it has been tried before and will founder in the teeth of both union and management intransigence.

The big problem is that the NHS, despite its quasi-religious status, is in essence just another clapped-out nationalised industry, like now-defunct British Leyland and British Steel in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s run for the benefit not of the patients, but for the people who work in it. The management is self-serving and the unions will fight any change tooth and nail. They’re already kicking back against Starmer’s vague, modest proposals. He says he’ll take them on but, trust me, he won’t.

Yet neither the bloated NHS bureaucracy nor the doctors’, nurses’ or ancillary unions are ever blamed for the failures of the system.

It’s always the fault of politicians and the lack of ‘resources’. While accepting that the NHS is broken, Starmer still couldn’t resist blaming the Tories, even though the last government hosed down the health service with cash, to the tune of a mind-boggling £165 billion last year.

He conveniently overlooked the fact that it was Labour which gave GPs bumper pay rises and relieved them of the arduous task of working weekends and evenings. Labour also adopted European working directives which put extra pressure on NHS rotas.

One of the first acts of this Labour government was to bung junior doctors a 22 per cent salary increase without asking for anything in return.

These paragons of medical ethics were so intent on ‘first doing no harm’ that they spent most of the past two years on strike – and are already threatening to do so again unless Labour stuffs their mouths with even more gold.

Despite the heroic efforts of dedicated, often low-paid, front-line staff, especially during Covid, the whole edifice is crumbling, quite literally in the shape of some surgeries and hospital buildings.

Yet as far as the entrenched bureaucrats who run the NHS are concerned, ‘re-imagining’ involves, as John Lennon didn’t sing, imagining there’s no patients. Why are they never held to account?

Amanda Pritchard has been chief executive of NHS England since 2021. She has 32 executive and non-executive directors. What the hell have they been doing for the past three years while the ‘service’ they are paid handsomely to administer has been going even further down the gurgler?

Now that Labour is promising a new broom, can we expect all those directly responsible for the failures of the past and present, not to mention the squandering of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, to be sacked? Starting with Pritchard. What do you think?

If this was any privately run enterprise, she’d have been shown the door already, along with the rest of the time-servers standing in the way of progress and genuine reform.

But this is the reality of the NHS. No one is ever accountable, even as patients die prematurely and suffer on waiting lists and trolleys in hospital corridors.

Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here.