Overmanning in public life...

There is a quote from Chandler in Friends, “All right, kids, I gotta get to work. If I don’t input those numbers... it doesn’t make much of a difference.” It reminds me of the civil service – you could probably sack two-thirds of them and it won’t make much of a difference.

The National Health Service employs about a million people – not all of them actually do anything beneficial. Many are pen pushers. In fact, at the Department of Health there is a department called the MRSA Cleaner Hospitals Team. I have no idea what they do but it seems to me that they would be a lot more useful if instead of sitting in an office shuffling paper they were given a mop and a bucket of bleach and sent to actually clean hospitals.

We can't afford IVF for all...

At PMQs today stand-in Harriet Harman was asked a question about IVF and said in essence that it should be available on the NHS everywhere and not just in certain areas - the so-called postcode lottery.

IVF should not be available on the NHS for anyone. When the health service began in 1948 it was formed to treat the sick, the elderly, children, victims of accidents and catastrophic illnesses - not to provide people with children that they can't have in the normal way.

Whilst I have sympathy for those people who want children but are unable to have them, it should not be the responsibility of the National Health Service to provide free fertility treatment anymore than it should pay for nosejobs, tattoo removals or sex change operations.

Successive governments have poured pots of money into the NHS and with what to show for it - and now people are dying from illnesses they have caught in hospitals.

Everyone should pay for healthcare...

This month is apparently “is Gypsy and Traveller month, an important time in the Equality and Human Rights calendar”.

The NHS wants to help more gypsies “access services” within the health service – an admirable aim, one might think.

Ian Holding of the Gypsy and Traveller Team at Bristol City Council has initiated a scheme to help them. He asks, “How can they access health services when they are moving about so much?”

Presumably, since they are moving about they are not paying tax or national insurance, so one might ask why they are entitled to health services they have not paid for?

Another waste of taxpayers' money

In July 1948 Nye Bevan opened the first NHS hospital. Its aim was to provide health care - preventative as well as curative.

He would be turning in his grave to learn that between 2005 and 2006 the NHS performed two dozen taxpayer-funded hymen replacement operations, official figures revealed.

Labour MP Ann Cryer said: "We have to also ask whether our National Health Service should be providing this sort of facility. I don't think it should be available on the NHS."

The Department of Health said "certain cosmetic procedures" are available on the NHS "to secure physical or psychological health".

The NHS was created to cure people of illnesses, not for people to have tattoos removed, sex changes or for women to have their fannies tightened.

Bureaucracy is sending people blind

One of the worst afflictions that can befall someone must surely be to go blind. It must be much worse if their sight could be saved.

This is the fate befalling 16,000 people who could have benefited from Macugen, a treatment for age-related macular degeneration, the biggest cause of blindness in Britain.

The treatment costs £5,000 a year but primary care trusts which are short of money have imposed such strict criteria on its use that many doctors do not even ask permission to prescribe it.

Figures obtained by the Conservatives under the Freedom of Information Act show that just 268 requests to use Macugen were made last year. Of those, 193 were granted.

Harold Thorn, 87, from East Sheen in south-west London, has lost so much of his sight that he can no longer read a newspaper. He has been refused Macugen twice by Richmond and Twickenham primary care trust.

He said: "I keep trying to be positive, but I find it very hard. If they can’t give funds for people who are losing their eyesight, what does the NHS pay for?"

I can tell Mr Thorn: it is spent on sex change operations, tattoo removal and other unnecessary procedures as well as paying for an army of bureaucrats.

People like him, nearing the end of their lives, are expected to suffer in silence.

(with Laura Donnelly)

NHS car parks pay for patients...apparently

I don't know why I am still amazed by Tony Blair's rhetoric - after ten years I should be used to it - but I am.

As anyone who has ever visited a sick friend or relative in hospital knows, the parking fees are astronomical.

Now Tony Blair has said that they have to be exorbitant or else the NHS would have to face cuts. The PM, confronted at a meeting of Labour's ruling National Executive Committee, said NHS trusts needed the cash and losing it would mean cuts. Leaked minutes of the 20 March meeting said of Mr Blair: "He defended hospital income from parking charges as otherwise the money would have to come from patient care."

What???

The parking fees, which vary widely, have become cash cows for NHS trusts which raked in more than £95million in England last year. Mr Blair and Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt are resisting growing demands to scrap them or enforce capping.

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb said: "The PM is blind to what is happening. Excessive hospital car park charging can become a tax on sickness, hitting those on low incomes and the elderly hard."

And Labour MP Sharon Hodgson said: "The burden of car parking and other travel charges just adds too much financial stress and strain to many cancer patients and others with serious illnesses. The Government needs to show sympathy, at least by exempting certain patients from parking charges."

The parking fees apparently pay for doctors and nurses. It was only a while back that he was telling us that we couldn't have cheaper petrol because the tax pays for "schools'n'ospitals".

Does every tax pound fund the NHS?

What do we pay National Insurance for?

Vote Labour!

Medics on the march

Today in London hundreds of medical staff are protesting about the way in which junior doctors are hired.

I have seen footage from the march on two television channels and the people who are marching are predominantly white. On the rare occasions I have been to a hospital (to visit the sick) or go to a GP (although at the moment I don't have one), the vast majority of doctors are coloured.

So what happens to all the white ones? Do they all end up in private practice?