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My wife works at a very high level in the NHs and I hear about the problems they have regularly. I respect Norm but he seems to be confused, Doctors have never had control of the NHS budgets until the recent changes have been brought in and many of these "managers" are actually medical staff. My wife deals with them daily and there are those who truely think they can run multimillion budgets and are now finding out it is not that easy. There are other Doctors who say they are trained to heal people and know they do not have the business savy to run departments and just want to be a Doctor. The big problem is if you allowed every consultant to buy every thing they wanted there would be no amount of money that would be enough for the NHS. Oncologists would want every drug produced for thier patients, every surgeon would want more tackle as it came out but there has to be a limit. The piece of equipment that the nurse said was not wanted, was probably demanded by someone who by the time it arrived had left. That is where the controls come in from the centre which must be sensible and not made on a whim. Where it is very difficult is where one area allows one procedure or drug and another does not. Many of the changes now are being driven from two directions, patient choice which with the agreement of the gp means you can ask for treatment at a specific location and the other is to reduce the costs. The back office functions are being changed so you have the commissioning units, who are based around Doctors and the reporting and finance side. On the later these new units have 2 years before outside companies can compete for the NHS work. This has meant that exsisting NHS staff have been transferred with full terms but all the new staff do not get pension provision and the benefits which over the years will save millions. The threat of competition has already started to make a differance to attitudes towards keeping cost down on everything for the commissoning groups without affecting the care levels demanded. The biggest problem with the NHS is Whitehall where faceless people suggest things to transient ministers and keep changing things. What the parties should do is agree to a 15 years no change policy to allow things to work. The NHS is a juggernaut which cannot change direction in a 5 year parliment. The other problem is unions who have done a good job for their members at the expense of the care provided. Many nurses are on very good wages and in many cases deservedly so but we now have too many of these and not enough care assistants who do the tasks some nurse will not like daily ablutions with the patients. This added cost makes staffing levels lower. The majority of people still hold the NHS in high regard, but to others the fact it is free makes it have little value. These are the people who don't turn up for Doctors appointments, who cancel specialist appointments at the drop of a hat. My Daughter is in the final year of Med school and has just completed two sections where she was working with Community Pediatrics and also Physciatrics. In both of these clinics the appointments are 30 mins and yet there were days when half the appointments were not kept. How can people not care enough to take their kids? If they had paid for the appointment I am sure they would have turned up. I could go on but the subject is so huge and peoples knowledge is always going to be limited by what they are told. It is only when you get tragic cases like Stafford where Doctors and nurses forgot why they were there and let people die does the papers really get interested. We nevr have had all the facts and nevr will on the NHS but for all its faults it is still something other countries envy

Budweiser ribbons on the FA cup. Nearly as bad as BMW's escorting the Olympic torch.

When I worked in Brownfield land insurance and development in the 1990's I was working on a former strategic fuel storage depot in devon polluted with TEL (Tetra Etyhl Lead) and luminescent dials from old aircraft. Protocol used to be to burn the dash boards of ex-aircraft and rake out the ash spreading the radioactive stuff all over the shop. One day a team were surveying with a geiger counter and kept getting readings all over the shop whenever i was behind them... turned out my rolex watch from the 1940's was setting it off!!!

Pm replied to, I'll def take these just need to sort out collection logistics. Cheers