Category: Health, housing and adult social services

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Health, housing and adult social services

The NHS march and rally: A great day for our borough

I got a bit sunburnt on Ealing Common this afternoon talking to loads of people. It was lovely to see so many people out and to see everyone going in more or less the same direction. One of the things you learn quite quickly in local politics is that for most of the time we all agree on most of the issues most of the time, whether it is HS2, the third runway at Heathrow or the loss of all our local A&Es. It often isn’t that complicated.

The local Conservatives were out in force encouraging people to take part in the consultation. We have all signed the petitions, marched and rallied and now the way to get inside the decision makers’ heads and make them change their minds is for people to individually respond to the consultation. When you are making big decisions petitions sometimes wash over you. You acknowledge the hard work of the person who went and bugged their neighbours for signatures but it rarely makes you question your assumptions. When you get personal e-mails every day from different people, in their own words, you quickly start to have doubts and you revisit all of your calculations. Individual responses to the consultation are what will shake the confidence of the NHS North West London decision makers.

Take the next step, is respond to the consultation.

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Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services

Ealing pretty much average in delivering diabetes care

This piece on ITN today discusses a National Audit Office report into NHS diabetes care. Diabetes is a big issue for our borough. Going into the bowels of the report (Appendix 2) it seems that the old Ealing PCT was slightly better than average in terms of delivering diabetes care. Under half of diabetes sufferers across the UK get the gold standard care laid down by the NHS way back in 2001. In Ealing the number is just over half, better than some areas but not great.

It looks like our local GPs really need to do better here. I am sure that it is hard work to persuade some people to do what they should but that is in the nature of preventative medicine.

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Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services National politics

Tories punish landlords

I have been giving Cllr Hitesh Tailor, Labour’s housing spokesman in Ealing, a hard time over his handwringing over the Tories’ reform of the discredited housing benefit system, in particular Local Housing Allowance. See here, here and here.

Sorting out the re-cycling tonight I noticed this advert on the back of the Gazette’s property supplement from last week. It promises landlords “High Rents Fixed until April 2013.” Note “High Rents” not “reasonable rents” or “fair rents”.

The bottom line is that Tailor is concerned that people like Somali refugee Saeed Khaliif might be inconvenienced by the new government’s changes to the Labour’s Local Housing Allowance (LHA) system. The government wants to limit LHA to £500 per week from April 2013. This is hardly radical. You need to earn about £50K a year to be able to pay that amount of rent (and nothing else). The idea that taxpayers want to give way more than even this generous cash limit to indigent refugees to live in Hampstead is plain silly. Cllr Withani and other leftie housing types will tell you that this reform will be hard on tenants. The reality is that it will be hard on landlords who have enjoyed high rents totally divorced from reality. Under LHA landlords have been receiving supernormal rents. It seems that Cllr Withani is the landlord’s friend.

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Health, housing and adult social services

BBC spinning for Labour again

I got home this evening and tuned into BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight programme to catch up with the news. I listened to the piece on Andrew Lansley’s proposed reforms of the NHS with interest. My antennae started to twitch as I listened to Frances Crook who was a non-executive director of a NHS PCT trust. Was this the voice of an independently minded practitioner? Oh no! The BBC had managed to roll out a Labour place(wo)man. According to Wikipedia:

Frances Crook OBE (born 18 December 1952) is the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Appointed in 1986, she has been responsible for research programmes and campaigns to raise public concern about suicides in prison, the over-use of custody, poor conditions in prison, young people in trouble and mothers in prison. She writes articles for the national media, and frequently does interviews on radio and television news.

Frances Crook was the campaigns co-coordinator at the British Section of Amnesty International from 1980 to 1985.

After taking a history degree at Liverpool University she qualified as a teacher, working in secondary schools in Liverpool and London until 1980. She was twice elected as a Labour Councillor for East Finchley in the London Borough of Barnet, serving from 1982 to 1990. She was a Governor of the University of Greenwich for 6 years and chaired the Staff and General Committee, retiring in 2002. She was awarded the Freedom of the City of London in 1997.

Jewish by birth, she lives in London with her daughter Sarah.

Crook was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 New Year Honours.

So, ex-Labour councillor who gets a salary from a Primary Care Trust (PCT) doesn’t like Tory health reforms which will see the back of PCTs. Big surprise. Shame on the BBC for passing off a Labour politician who is already bought and paid for as an independent voice. Typical.

No doubt the BBC spotted Crook as a result of her article in the New Statesman earlier this year.

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Communications disease Health, housing and adult social services

NHS ad spending was £56 million last year, twice previous year

On Tuesday a ministerial statement was put out by Minister of State, Department of Health, Phil Hope, correcting five years worth of written answers on the subject of NHS advertising, see here. Apparently £56.43 million was spent by the NHS on advertising last year, about double the total of each of the preceding four years. The largest amount was £23.38 million spent on tobacco related campaigns.

The figures exclude production costs, COI fees (see previous post) and VAT. They exclude all the comms staff and glossy annual reports. They exclude management meetings where the aesthetics of these ads are discussed. We can safely assume that NHS communications spending is some hundreds of millions of Pounds.

Hat tip: Dizzy Thinks

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Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services

Labour won’t fight for Ealing Hospital’s stroke unit

The Joint Committee of London Primary Care Trusts (JCPCT) has just voted unanimously to close Ealing Hospital’s Stroke Unit. As a result Ealing stroke patients will be forced out of the Borough to units such as Hillingdon and Charing Cross. Both units have a worse rating than Ealing. Visit the website to check it.

The Ealing PCT representative who voted to close the Stroke Unit at Ealing Hospital was none other than former Labour Mayor Phil Portwood. Equally lamentable was the failure of Ealing Southall Labour MP, Virendra Sharma, to make a submission to the joint committee. Labour have really let Ealing down.

Meanwhile Tory councillors are hopping mad. They have been fighting to save the unit:

  • representations were made by the Leader of the Council, Cllr Jason Stacey and the Cabinet Member for Health, Cllr Mark Reen to Healthcare for London (HfL)
  • Cllr Gregory Stafford, the Conservative Chairman of Ealing’s Health Scrutiny Panel, held a six-hour meeting on the issue and submitted a major report to HfL demanding that the unit be saved
  • Cllr Gurcharan Singh, the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Southall, collected a petition of over eighteen hundred people calling for the Stroke Unit to be kept at Ealing Hospital.
Continue reading “Labour won’t fight for Ealing Hospital’s stroke unit”
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Health, housing and adult social services National politics

If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas

The NHS Confederation’s Nigel Edwards is not very happy with me. He says:

Didn’t like your blog coverage much! We are not a trade union and this is not special pleading: there is no more money to be had, the banks have it all, benefits will get the rest, tax receipts are falling. All healthcare systems across Europe are going to experience this whether they are funded by tax or insurance. The target of this document is:

1) our own members – they need to think about how to respond to this
2) politicians who need to think about some difficult choices.

If these are their target audiences it is hard to know how the report got to be the featured on the BBC News at Ten. Reading their report it is a sensible attempt to discuss the issues raised by the coming Brown bust squeeze. Unfortunately for the NHS Confederation their report got hijacked by the BBC wanting to do a lurid NHS cuts story. Maybe Nigel might have noticed the BBC’s agenda when they were doing his make up at the bleak “wasteland” location they chose to do his piece to camera. Ooops.

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Health, housing and adult social services National politics

NHS producer interests pull off media coup

Last night BBC News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards solemnly intoned at the top of the show:

Tonight at ten: the record funding crisis set to hit the NHS within a couple of years. NHS managers tell the BBC that the funding shortfall will mean fundamental changes for the service in England.

Then we had Nigel Edwards from the NHS Confederation going all Old Testament on us:

Having had seven years of plenty it now looks like seven years of famine from 2011 onwards.

nigel-edwards

Note how staged this image is – this is not news. Note the NHS Confederation was not named in this package save for this graphic caption.

Continue reading “NHS producer interests pull off media coup”
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Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services

Last Ealing Times

The last ever Ealing Times plopped on to my mat this morning. I think that this is a great shame. The Ealing Times has been making hay over the last few weeks with parking stories but I still think it is a matter of regret that we have lost one of our two local papers. I feel that both local papers often get stories factually wrong and they almost always add a dash of hyperbole to jazz them up. They do though play an important role locally in holding local bodies to account.

The front page of today’s Ealing Times highlights how the NHS in Ealing is going to lose £26 million. To be precise the body that spends money on our behalf, the Primary Care Trust, will have £26 million less to build health centres, provide new services, etc. I predicted in January last year that we wouldn’t get any money back that we lent to the Minister of Health and now we find we are being asked to lend more.

Sorry about the lack of blogging this week. The baby has been ill so I have been a fulltime father rather the usual part-time role.

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Health, housing and adult social services

Healthy Ealing? – ish

On Tuesday the latest health profile for Ealing was published, see here. The NHS is such a cumbersome bureaucracy that the report is based on three year old figures. There are four areas where Ealing is seriously underperforming:

  • childhood obesity
  • children’s tooth decay
  • diabetes
  • new cases of TB.

The first three of these shout out that we have to get kids off the sweet stuff and look at all our diets.

Although Ealing Hospital does get very bad reports it is re-assuring that the trend pictures show Ealing improving along with the England average over the last ten years.