Capita and pals get £500m for ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE call centre The Department of Health (DH) has awarded a framework agreement to four suppliers for health-related managed contact centre services, worth up to £500m. Capita Customer Management, 118, Vangent and MM Teleperformance have been named as the chosen suppliers. According to a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union, …
It was devolved, that was the point of the PCT, it put local services under the direct organisational control of a local institution. And in some cases such as a city there was very local institutions as it was done by population size.
However now you GP handling some, the council some, the hospital some, dependent on your area. (Too complicated to list here but it is a choice by the board of the provider arm of the PCT as to which you have to put up with. And to think your council might now be in charge og both refuse collection and district nursing) And the comissioning arm of the PCT is now all GP run.
GP's are outsourcing most of the functions the PCT did because it costs too much for them to run or train up etc, or they band together and pay someone else to do it, things like FOI, DPA, Accounting. And those companies are anywhere and anyone, they are not local and don't have to be. (I dread to think who is now in charge of malpractice and medicines management, who watches the watchmen as they say)
And then on top of that you have to face the fact most has devolved to whitehall and the "monitor" which oversees what the 151 PCT's used to do. Although the SHA which was useless still is around and still is useless, as one Exec Director told me, the SHA is where Chief Execs go when they don't have a job.
When I was working in the NHS and helping run the pandemic, the flu helpline was rubbish and failed on every possible level of testing, from none english speakers taking 3.50 minutes before they heard a none english speaker. To three different ways to get a URN for your tamiflu, two of which the GP ignored and none of which was recorded on anyone of the 4 DB's that the NHS set up. So anything is an improvement.
The thought of a private company now running the public health response would suggest the only NHS aspect still remaining in Govt hands, Public Health. Has now been devolved out to private sector.
Nye Bevan forgive us.
You seem to be commenting on "devolution" within the NHS. My comment was about "throughout the UK".
Scotland is still part of the UK, but "NHS Scotland" does not come under the auspices of the Department of Health, but those of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The structure is quite different to that in England -- for instance we do not have Primary Care Trusts any more. My complaint was the sloppy "reporting" (actually just a cut and paste from the Guardian article. I am not even sure that this waste of money even applies to Wales and Northern Ireland.
I have found the origin of this story:
http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:226542-2012:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
and it seems from section VI.2 that the numpties in Westminster are indeed paying their Capita chums lots of all our money to screw up all of our healthcare. Time for a mail to my MSP.
Well, we all know how Crapita and friends promise the world to governments, and how well they then actually deliver on time, on budget, and within their SLAs. Don't believe for a moment that *anybody* in government thinks this is going to work.
It only makes sense if you aim to provide an increasingly miserable, flawed, and inefficient service under the banner of the "NHS" such that full privatisation is seen as the "only way out" - conveniently providing time for the multi-nationals to get used to running the system at the same time so they know best how to carve it up and cherry pick. That'll be Tory policy on the NHS then.
But don't worry, we'll end up with a super efficient U.S. style heathcare system - with 15.3% of GDP being spent on healthcare while the uninsured die in anonymity and ignominy, as opposed to the terribly inefficient communist NHS which means the UK spends only 8.2% of its GDP on healthcare with dramatically better average outcomes for those who aren't fortunate enough to be wealthy or in well paid jobs. (http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat/2009/en/index.html)
"Don't believe for a moment that *anybody* in government thinks this is going to work."
Sadly, somebody in government *does" believe this will work, otherwise they wouldn't have donated £500m to their favourite charities *ahem* I mean professional, hard working, always-on time-and-budget, IT consultancies and outsourcing outfits.
Colin
yes hello sir my name is bibhu.... i mean Bob Smith how can i help you today?
*gurgle* i have flu i think i am dying
yes thank you sir now do you feel any temperature?
*arg* i think i just coughed up a lung
yes sir please answer the question else i can't help you
please i need help *gurgle*
sorry sir i cannot help you, you are being rude *click*
Don't waste your time at B&Q, whenever you go you'll find that whatever you are after is out of stock/broken. The B&Q near me is so poorly run that they have buckets strewn over the floor to catch the leaks when it rains. Hardly a good advert.
Head to Wickes, Homebase (maybe not as hard-core) to a small DIY retailer.
It has struck me for a long time (particularly in the light of the handling of the Foot & Mouth epidemic) that if there is some sort of pandemic / similar crisis we can rely on this country to handle it very badly, probably signifiantly worse than elsewhere. This is what I refer to as 'lessons have been learnt' syndrome - things are f****d up due to the ignorant and incapable outsourcing to the ignorant and incapable who outsource to the ignorant and incapable. The 'oh it was our subcontractors that screwed up' is a feature not a bug. Then it goes wrong, people wring their hands, say 'lessons have been learnt', the dogs bark and the caravan moves on.
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