Dying for a better ambulance service

Need one of these? Faster to your door from eBay than dialing 999 in Wales.

Sick people in Wales will be very pleased to hear that the new management team have had "another vote of confidence" from the all party report out on them today.

This confidence was apparently hidden somewhere in the damning report into the Welsh Ambulance service's legion management failures and woeful performance. In fact positive feedback is in such short supply in the media's quotes from the report that you would be forgiven for thinking the ambulance service management have lost their minds. I mean, what sane person would think that the Welsh Ambulance Service management was anything other than unworkable. You need an electron microscope to find good statistics about their performance.

Undeterred, however, their latest Saviour-in-Chief, Alan Murray, aimed to impress by spouting "We did not wait for those reports to be published before we started making improvements". The man is clearly a management god. People are dying in numbers not seen since the plague, ambulances response times are being measured in weeks, and they are going through Chief Execs faster than the relatives of the patients are going through kleenex. But does he sit on his hands for months counting body bags and waiting for the report to come out. No, he takes the initiative. He does 'stuff'. Incredible. Who would have thought it possible that the chief of a failing service, with hundreds of lives at stake, would 'do stuff' to try and help. Fuck, they must be thanking their lucky stars to have a man like Murray in charge.

Never trust politicians when they say it's not a matter of money. Everything in today's fundamentalist capitalist society is always about money. I'm sure the Welsh Ambulance service is underfunded, because all front line services are underfunded. Now if it was a private company owned by friends of NuLabour then that would be a different story. But it's never ALL about money, and when Roger Thayne says he can't help you, that's like Barbara Woodhouse saying your dog is untrainable. When Anton Van Dellen says he can't help you, that's like Suzanna and Trisha telling you to foget trying to look nice and just kill yourself. The Welsh Ambulance Service is fucked. So, sick people in Wales are fucked. And the reason would appear to be a management structure that is in denial and does not want to change. The kind of management structure that looks at a damning report into their failings and says 'This is another vote of confidence in us....'.

My top tip for the Welsh Assembly. Fire everyone who is not actually answering a phone in control or in an ambulance treating patients. THEN hire a good Chief Executive.