Farewell Lord Darzi

Lord Darzi: Back in the clinical saddle yesterday?

So, farewell then Lord Darzi. You were once described as a well tethered goat. No longer. You seem to have gnawed through the ropes binding you to your ministerial desk.

Or maybe you have just seen the light that this government is falling apart and you are deserting the wreckage, like so many previous health ministers are doing. Labour health reforms seem to be going backwards now with you and Britnell leaving. Soon we’ll have a government of no talents at all.

Or maybe you want more time with your robots and other family?

You did a great review of the NHS that had the great insight that, “"At the core of my report was one simple yet radical idea: to put quality - defined as patient experience, clinical effectiveness and patient safety - at the heart of the NHS."



Then you got slammed as Clive Peedell and everyone else asked, “What else has it ever been about?” thereby exposing the idiocy that has being going on as the government hashes up health policy even further with you as the useful idiot providing camouflage for its machinations.

I think your review will come to be seen as the worst kind of old fashioned managerial butchery- like a laparotomy- and with many, many complications.

Dr Rant notes that you are not planning to stay around to sort them out, and wishes you well in your forthcoming 'advisory' role to a private sector company hoping to cherry pick some profitable nuggets out of the mess that you know intimately well (because you made it).

Labour: always the wrong sort of choice

Here’s a brilliant example of a government repudiating its own record. This piece in the Guardian could be summarised down to,

“Labour OFFICIAL: We fucked it up. We got it wrong.”

However the more choice version is that Liam Byrne now admits that the choices Labour has offered have been somewhat empty.

“Byrne makes clear that the new approach is a big change from that adopted over the past 10 years under which Labour said it was offering the consumers of public services a choice. He says that has often been "an empty choice".”

"We need to give people real choices by locking down rights and entitlements and giving people fast means of redress ... In recent years power was basically pointing in the wrong direction. It was pointing up to senior civil servants and ministers in Whitehall and not pointing out to people. That helped create in too many places a culture of heads down, get the job done, deliver on the targets and tick the boxes."

A government making a big change in its policies after 12 years in power says that what has gone before was wrong. Well, we’d certainly agree with him on that.

It’s nice to see Labour are at last beginning to understand how badly its policies have done. Shame they didn’t realise it for Baby P, Staffordshire hospital and all the other “isolated” disasters that have occurred because of this governments ability to blame the staff rather than run services. Central credit and local blame again.

We, and other bloggers in fields of health, teaching, police, army and so on, will continue to help them to see exactly where they are going wrong.

The country will administer euthanasia and the (utterly undeserved) last rights to this dishonest, decrepit and disreputable government as soon as it possibly can.