Coming your way: £3.8 billion to spend on public health

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Norman Lamb: off the cuff and off piste at Localis Pic courtesy of The Guardian

Norman Lamb: off the cuff and off piste at Localis
Pic courtesy of The Guardian

In the middle of the biggest wave of austerity to hit England since the 1930s a cool £3.8 billion will be handed over to your local town hall and local NHS from 2015. The aim will be to switch money from your big hospital to your local community to spend on public health and social care.
Do you trust your local council to spend it wisely? Who will know what it has been spent on? and it will it unleash clever new ideas as promised to help local people?
This was a point of a press conference yesterday by the rather arcane titled think tank,Localis,to publish a report asking precisely that. Read it here.
It was launched by a Liberal Democrat health minister Norman Lamb, who began well by throwing his boring Whitehall brief on the floor and launching a passionate off the cuff speech calling for new ideas to stimulate local public health services.
As he was off piste, he refreshingly condemned those private companies exploiting lowly paid care workers, some even on below minimum wage rates,or zero hour contracts, and not being paid for travel between seeing different customers. He might have added that they should join a good union like Unite or GMB to take up their plight, but then he is a Liberal Democrat.
What is interesting about this initiative is that it might do some good. It means more freedom and money for local people to find ways to help the elderly, disabled, the local alcoholics and drug takers and if combined with better housing, transport, planning, job creation and children’s services it might make a difference.
But it is a big IF and it is clear from the Localis report that people have to be made accountable for how this money is spent and that has not been properly worked out. As the brilliant local government expert Tony Travers put it, that you know better who to complain about the dustbins than you do over public health. And he did not get a satisfactory answer from the minister.
In Berkhamsted as a previous blog pointed out we already have the makings of this at Gossoms End, a NHS community hospital with a GP surgery, a nursery, physio and local sheltered housing attached to get good local care. The minister said that the people of Great Yarmouth and Yeovil are also soon to benefit from new community schemes.
In the meantime an invitation to see Gossoms End is still there, Norman. That is if you can get your bossy civil servants to give you any space in your diary. And they may lynch you for throwing away their boring prepared speech.

New Privatised NHS: Medical Services Ltd broke patient ambulance contract

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The 5 hr wait ambulance: Picture taken by me at Hemel Hempstead Urgent Care Centre

The 5 hr wait ambulance: Picture taken by me at Hemel Hempstead Urgent Care Centre

Following my personal exposure of Medical Services Ltd appalling provision for weekend patient ambulance services, my local newspaper, the Gazette, took up the story. the experience onvolved waiting five hours for an ambulance to come and pick up my wife, Margaret, who recently had stroke, from Hemel Hempstead Urgent Care Centre.
Their report reveals that not only were the company at fault but it is clear that the people responsible for managing and overseeing the contract on behalf of the NHS were also to blame.
It is now revealed that Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Group require Medical Services Ltd ( gross profit £7m a year) to collect all patients within two hours. The contract says:
“The Contractor will collect patients from clinics within 60 minutes of being requested by the Department in 90% of cases and within 120 minutes on 100% of cases.”
So this amounts to a blatant breach of contract and if as staff at Hemel Hempstead Urgent Care Centre, say they are regularly leaving patients for up to four hours, this is not an isolated case.
There are also a serious questions for the West Herts Health Trust who are supposed to manage this contract.
Were they asleep when Medical Services Ltd were providing just one ambulance for patient transport and collecting patients from Bedford, Luton, Letchworth and Hitchin hospitals. Or were Medical Services Ltd two timing the authority by using the same ambulance for contracts with other health trusts? Did they allow Medical Services Ltd to close their Watford depot at weekends so all ambulances will have to travel from Luton to pick up patients at Watford General. Great guardians of taxpayers money and patients interests, I don’t think.
Why should the public put up with shoddy providers who flout contracts and complacent NHS supervisors who don’t check up on them?
If you’ve had a bad waiting experience with a private or public ambulance taking you back from hospital you can always use the contact me point on this website or contact the Gazette series of papers to complain. Just give me the details, day, time and wait.
Or you can now go one better. Samantha Jones, the chief executive of West Herts Hospitals Trust, has promised an inquiry after the publication of this blog and would like to hear from anybody who has had a bad or good experience using the patients ambulance service from watford, St Albans and Hemel Hempstead hospitals. Her email is samantha.jones@whht.nhs.uk.

Elm Guest House – “Mary Moss” files

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This is another significant post from Chris Fay, who has campaigned tirelessly to bring sexual abusers of children to justice, about a document on Elm Guest House in Barnes which has led to fevered speculation on the internet about a cover up of prominent figures who could have sexually abused children there. What he is saying here is that the victims are genuine but do not automatically assume that all the adults who are alleged to have stayed there are abusers. This does not mean that on going investigations under Operation Fernbridge will not lead to further arrests.

chris46's avatartheneedleblog

In the interests of accuracy, and to protect the reputations of innocent people, I would like to set the record straight about certain things contained in the “Mary Moss” files placed online last year.

These were mostly handwritten notes made on a daily basis concerning NAYPIC’s investigation into complaints from young people in the care of Richmond of abuse at Grafton Close Children’s Home, and elsewhere, including the Elm Guest House in Barnes from 1977 to 1982.

Unfortunately, being just notes, they have no real context.  I will try to provide that.  Amongst the documents is a list of boys names. These are VICTIMS not abusers.  These were the names of young people who had complained to us, were strictly confidential and should never have been made public.  Due to the unfortunate circumstances around the police raid on Mary Moss’s home, these were released online.

Also included was a list…

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Exaro News: Pay wall scrapped – It’s all free

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You can now read all my stories and many other good scoops on the Exaro website free of charge.
Just like my old employer The Guardian and unlike Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and Times there is no longer a pay wall between you and the story.
So go to the site and see and hear the full private Murdoch ” tape”; all the stories about Ed Lester, the former head of the Student Loans Company now at the Land Registry and his tax avoidance; all the stories on the Operation Fernbridge historic paedophile investigation; the government’s flawed plan to abolish the Audit Commission and embarrassing disclosures about the activities of the Serious Fraud Office.
Exaro is now funding its activities with a big expansion in data journalism -aimed at business.
Go on indulge yourself!

The New Privatised NHS : Wait five hours for a patient transport ambulance

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Discreet logo of Medical Services on" NHS " ambulance. Pic taken by myself

Discreet logo of Medical Services on” NHS ” ambulance. Pic taken by myself

Medical Services Ltd is not a name instantly recognised by the general public. Their website claims they are the nation’s leader in the providing integrated patient transport and is bulging with testimonials from a grateful public.
The Anglo- Danish company (Falck a Danish private fire and ambulance company has just paid for a 45 per cent stake and put a director on the board) claims to be Britain’s biggest private ambulance provider, operating in London,Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and North West England.
It is well placed to make a lot of money as the NHS is progressively privatised,having according to its latest company accounts,a turnover of £29m, gross profits of £7m, and operating profits of £577,000.
However its PR appeal does not live up to reality. I am in the position of caring for my wife Margaret, who suffered a stroke while we were on holiday.
As previous posts on this site show, she received amazing treatment from the NHS when it happened on the Isles of Scilly and is receiving very good loving care and physio at Gossoms End rehab unit in Berkhamsted.
At the moment she can’t stand up or walk unaided and can only travel in ambulances.
Last weekend she had to get an X-ray – after toppling over – to make sure she had not broken her wrist. She received a speedy transit to Hemel Hempstead urgent care unit in an NHS staffed ambulance and was seen, X rayed,and sorted by the doctor’s co-operative who run the centre.
But then things went wrong. We were told we had to wait two hours. Two hours became three and then four. We pressed staff at the centre to find out whether this ambulance would ever turn up. Finally nearly five hours later it did, the driver saying it had only heard about the job half an hour ago when he started work on the night shift
Checking with staff I discovered that the ” nation’s leader in integrated patient transport ” is regularly leaving vulnerable disabled people for four hours before it picks them up.They said the Luton centre was rude to NHS staff and was fairly callous about patients having to wait in distress.
Later I discovered that Medical Services Ltd had just ONE patient transport ambulance on duty on Saturday evening covering the whole of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire from Letchworth to Watford and Dunstable to Bedford. They have a depot in Watford, with ambulances there, but they close it at weekends. No wonder it took five hours.
Next day I penned a pretty angry e-mail to one Joe Sheehan, managing director of Medical Services ( salary £120,000 last year – a 20 per cent rise). I suspect it caused him a bit of indigestion over Sunday lunch at his Kent home but I will credit him that he did respond to me -including sending me his mobile phone number.
Also to his credit he investigated it, admitted it happened and apologised for a ” sub standard service”.
He has also promised short-term action to remedy some of my complaints by rostering extra staff at the weekend so people won’t wait so long and raise the issue with the NHS commissioners who contracted him to do the work.
I have also sought an explanation from the East of England Ambulance Trust. They pointed out, see their comment on this blog, that they don’t commissioned his company. But they have got in touch with the Herts Valley Clinical Commissioning Group who are now contacting Medical Services Ltd about the delay. I hope to find out when they let contracts for patient transport whether they specify standards of service or staffing cover. They could have a share of the blame if they don’t.
I suspect however most people would never have thought of even finding out who owned the ambulance that came to pick them up – they would have assumed as a member of the public did when I was photographing the ambulance – that it is the NHS.
This is why I am told NHS staff at hospitals, urgent care centres, and the front line drivers ( this one was courtesy himself) bear the brunt of public anger for shoddy services while I fear the management of these private companies just collect the money and never have to face the public or be hauled to account.
This managing director – to be fair to him – seems to have smelt the coffee. He had better. The public deserve better.

Government’s barmy and complex plan to tackle defamation on the web

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The Ministry of Justice has just excelled itself with a daft plan to try and tackle libellous and abusive comments on websites.
A splendid blog on the Inforrm website by media lawyer Ashley Hurst from Olswang reveals that a so-called simple system to provide redress to force web operators to take down posts is anything but that.
As he himself states the ministry claimed it “designed to be as straightforward as possible for people to use” but there are in excess of 20 cross-references in a procedure spanning over four pages with 47 FAQs and 10 pages of guidance.”
Worse it looks as though it will do the opposite that it intends by encouraging more people to blog anonymously as people might have to get court orders to find out who is behind the post.
He points out “People blog and comment on websites anonymously for a reason: because they do not want to be identified. Why would an anonymous blogger suddenly identify himself without a court order because a website operator tells him that a legal complaint has been received? There is absolutely no incentive, especially for a whistleblower, someone intent on causing damage, or someone who cannot afford to be sued, to come forward and identify themself voluntarily as a potential defendant.”
There is also a 48 hour fast track application to get someone’s post down – but make one mistake in the form and web operator can ignore. I can’t imagine WordPress, based in the US with a tradition of free speech, being over impressed by these new UK regulations.
For those who want to study it further he supplies a flow diagram, which almost rates in complexity ( but not quite) with Andrew Lansley’s re-organisation of the NHS.
In my view the planned regulations look hardly worth the paper they are written on. They seem a waste of cyberspace.

The dodgy background behind child abuse at Kincora and Richmond

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This post is worth reading for those following the Kincora and Richmond child sexual abuse scandals after the release of Cabinet papers showing that the Thatcher Cabinet discussed and rejected a full scale inquiry into Kincora in 1983. This post is from Chris Fay, who has tirelessly campaigned for justice for kids abused at Elm Guest House. I am not certain about the claim of a Cabinet committee meeting on August 24 1982 to discuss Elm Guest House raid. But the post shows up what a murky world existed at both Kincora and Richmond and also suggests a link between them which I am becomingly increasingly interested in exploring. Chris Fay should be taken seriously because of his involvement in the case at the time of the first raid.

chris46's avatartheneedleblog

Those who have followed events at the Elm Guest House in Barnes, until it was closed down in a “police” raid in 1982, will know there has always been some dispute over the nature of the raid that took place. Carol Kazir (and her legal team) always insisted that this raid was carried out under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1976. The police and government have always insisted it was under vice law legislation. All I can say is, Carol gave me the “notice to detained persons” issued under the Act, to stop her talking to a lawyer. This I gave to the coroner at Carol Kazir’s inquest in the summer of 1990.

Why has this always been so important and what did it matter which law was used to conduct the raid? Well, without benefit of counsel, Special Branch were the first to question her. They were not interested…

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Immigration: Hypocrisy from the Home Office to Waitrose and Marks and Spencer

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waitrose: aiding and abetting the end of higher agricultural wages

waitrose: aiding and abetting the end of higher agricultural wages

high class/low wage produce from hugh lowe farms pic credit: twitter

high class produce from hugh lowe farms pic credit: twitter

While a Home Office van tours the London borough of Brent telling illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest the food suppliers to our most ” ethical “supermarkets are going out of their way to encourage low paid immigration to Britain to pick the strawberries, raspberries and blackberries now on sale in Waitrose and Marks and Spencer.
The most prominent is run by Marion and Joe Regan. She is one of the leading lights in the fruit growers world and she supplies strawberries to Wimbledon, Waitrose and Marks and Spencer.
Look at the website more closely and you will find it is in English, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian and Russian The reason is Hugh Lowe Farms are desperate to recruit labour and are targeting workers from these countries to come to Britain. The Bulgarians and Romanians – though not allowed to come here until next year – can come through a government seasonal workers scheme run, yes, by the Home Office – the very ministry behind the offensive vans.
Why Russian you may ask. Well, believe or not, fruit growers are worried ( Nigel Farage of UKIP please note) that when the Romanians and Bulgarians get the freedom of the whole EU, they won’t want to come here. Why? Because the UK under the Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition – is now being regarded as such a low wage economy and so expensive to live in – that they would rather work on farms in other EU countries.
So the fruit growers want to RELAX immigration control further and get the Home Office to approve a seasonal workers scheme for Ukrainians from next year to pick their fruit. The reason Ukrainians are even poorer than Romanians – and can’t get access to the EU.
One might have a smidgeon of sympathy for the growers need to attract workers if it were not they are also the leading lights in abolishing from the end of September the Agriculture Wages Board – which guarantees slightly higher wages than the minimum wage and the supermarkets, while officially neutral, are aiding and abetting them.
This allows lower wages from British workers recruited for the next season – a group as you can see, the fruit growers have great difficulty in recruiting already or they wouldn’t be chasing people abroad.
Waitrose can be directly implicated in the move behind lower pay – since one of their leading women executives, Heather Jenkins sat on the Farming Better Regulation Task Force – the very body that recommended its abolition. Waitrose say her role was independent, but I presume they gave her time off to do it.
Lord Currie, chair of Leckford Farms, ( more in a separate blog about him later) a major supplier to Waitrose and having opened the company’s first farm shop, is hysterical about abolishing the board.
So when you next shop in Waitrose or Marks and Spencer just remember the fruit on sale there from Britain is most likely picked by foreign workers whose suppliers are keen to get rid of a board that provides a minimum standard for workers in an already low paid industry.
Of course Waitrose and M & S deny to me that want to cut wages, so does Marion Regan of Hugh Lowe Farms in Kent- promising to put them up. But Marion Regan’s company was so lax in checking its own website – that until this week it was advertising for foreign workers on its foreign language sites at last year’s rate of pay – a full 11p an hour lower than the legal rate.

Thatcher Cabinet stifled Kincora child sex abuse inquiry 30 years ago

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Lord Prior; pic courtesy of uk.parliament

Lord Prior; pic courtesy of uk.parliament

Jim Prior,now Lord Prior. blocked the opportunity for a full-scale public inquiry into the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal, Cabinet minutes released under the 30 year rule revealed today.

The minutes of the Cabinet meeting (see http://bit.ly/19zxFqT ) reveal on 10 November 1983 Jim Prior, then Northern Ireland Secretary, proposed not to have a full Tribunal of Inquiry – the same mechanism, used to investigate  the Bloody Sunday atrocities, the North Wales child abuse scandal and the Dunblane massacre.
The minutes reveal the Cabinet – who included the now all ennobled Leon Brittan, then home secretary, Michael Heseltine,defence secretary and Norman Fowler, social services secretary, bought the Royal Ulster Constabulary line that there was nothing in it. He said he was being “pressed to hold an inquiry under the Tribunals of Inquiry”. But he didn’t believe Parliament would buy it.
But he said two police investigations had discovered nothing and no further criminal charges were likely.
Instead he proposed to hold a much lesser inquiry, which he did later, to, as he put it “to halt further spread of rumour and unfounded allegations.”
This particular Cabinet minute now looks sick in view of the decision of the Police Service in Northern Ireland to re-open an investigation into the historic allegations at the children’s home where children were sexually abused in the 1970s and early 1980s. As Fiona O’Cleirigh reported on Exaro News the scandal will now be re-opened.
The question is were Thatcher’s Cabinet in 1983 hopelessly naive or were they covering up something they did not want to be ruthlessly exposed in the public domain.

NHS 101 :Bye Bye NHS Direct, Hello rip off merchants

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The announcement today that NHS Direct is to pull out of the NHS 111 services should be no surprise to anybody.
As readers of this blog will know the chief executive already had deep misgivings as https://davidhencke.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/exclusive-byebye-nhs-direct-leaked-chiefs-e-mail/ revealed.
It was already clear that private profit making providers were taking over many services – putting in cheapskate staff in call centres who are probably Googling your symptoms on the net as you speak. And a lot of them don’t have qualified medical staff on board on a 24 hour basis. This is certain if you want to cut costs from £20 to £9 a call and make a profit on each call for their directors.
No wonder NHS Direct couldn’t compete and accident and emergency services are flooded with calls.

The statement says: NHS Direct is seeking to withdraw from the NHS 111 contracts it entered into as these have proved to be financially unsustainable. The Trust will continue to provide a range of web, mobile and telephone services for patients which complement NHS 111 and support the NHS. These services are unaffected by the discussions currently taking place.

Nick Chapman, NHS Direct Chief Executive said:
“We will continue to provide a safe and reliable NHS 111 service to our patients until alternative arrangements can be made by commissioners. Whatever the outcome of the discussions on the future, patients will remain the central focus of our efforts, together with protecting our staff who work on NHS 111 to ensure that the service will continue to benefit from their skills and experience.”

I would suggest anyone using NHS 111 for advice should ask the call operator for his or her medical qualifications and quiz her or him about the source of the information. If unsatisfied demand to speak to someone who has medical qualifications, because for every call made to NHS 111 the private owners are making money out of you as a taxpayer. Otherwise be wary of using the service at all.