Column
News from Nowhere
The merger of the Commission for Health Improvement and the Audit Commission into a new inspectorate is going badly, say NfN moles.
A careful cull of senior staff has taken some very experienced individuals out of the regulatory system, just as the new inspectorate needs all the resources it can get if it is to increase the heat on the professions generally and the Royal Colleges in particular. Their replacements will have a lot to learn, quickly, in a political environment that will be ‘challenging’ (a management euphemism for ‘near impossible’, according to our NfN dictionary of NHS babble).
The new administration seems about as organised and coherent as the average Primary Care Trust, which is disconcerting given that it will inspect PCTs, and management zig-zags over simple things like building space have antagonised staff and quite possibly wasted significant amounts of public money. Old CHI was too cosy with the medical profession, thinks Downing Street, and its movers and shakers need moving and shaking.
The result may not be the bright and vigorous campaigning body that the modernisers want, however, because the newcomers (including a quota of NfN moles) may be less skilled and less in touch than they think, and simply have to muddle through in the usual NHS way. In which case their days are numbered too.
Our people inside public health have become more depressed than usual since Public Health News started publishing unusually uncritical articles. The first bout of gloom followed an article on NHS support for ME sufferers, now recognised by the government as a group needing more public resources. The depression of NfN moles was triggered the realisation that public campaigning for ill-health now pays off (given that ME is an invisible disability) and that special interest groups with an interest in the public purse can now thrive outside the medical-industrial complex.
Our moles are tough folk, of course, and they were beginning to regain their usual élan when another blow landed. The relapse followed an argument for prescribing fruit and vegetables in primary care, using the tired old story that because so many people troop through the surgeries of general practitioners, GPs are well positioned to alter their eating habits. Most NfN helpers in public health thought that this 1970s notion had been buried by the weight of evidence in the 1990s, and did not expect this particular zombie to still be walking.
News from Nowhere is therefore organising support groups to ease friends through this crisis, and will be seeking NHS funding for them. Workshops will be held on ‘why does nobody care about evidence?’, ‘whatever happened to neurasthenia?’ and ‘why has the organisation no memory?’
And we are planning a special Condescension Pack for use in the NHS, with prescriptions for exercise, fruit and veg, positive thinking, and films without portrayals of sex and violence. Testimonials will assert the benefits of the Condescension regime: ‘I was once fat, smelly and ate chips, but now I am in the Number 10 policy unit and send my children to private school’. As ever, feedback is welcome.
