Government Doing Something Or Other To NHS

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley today announced plans to do something so absurdly complicated to the National Health Service that nobody will be able to figure out what the hell it all means until it’s too late.

Hospitals will be taken out of the NHS – that much seems clear enough – but medical and business experts alike are scratching their heads over what in the name of Christ is meant by “a vibrant industry of social enterprises”.

“Does that mean they’ll have me performing abortions on customers right here in the shop with a knitting needle, like back in the old days?” asked Elsie Bunce, 92, an Oxfam shop worker in Halifax. “I don’t think I’d like that very much.”

Strategic health authorities and primary care trusts will be abolished under Mr Lansley’s scheme. Responsibility for public health will pass to the same cash-strapped local authorities who don’t see the need to empty your bins; while GPs will be able to meet up for a pleasant round of golf, during the course of which they will cordially agree on which costly life-saving hospital services they think could be quietly shut down without too many people noticing.

A really and truly independent NHS board will be set up, promised Mr Lansley, in order to make it look like somebody somewhere is keeping some sort of eye on the wholesale randomisation of healthcare provision.

Meanwhile, patients will be given an important role in the future of the NHS, being granted complete freedom to choose which GP they would prefer to tell them he’s afraid he won’t be able to fund their operation, because he used up his allocation budget two months ago.

Reaction to the health secretary’s vague wish-list has been mixed. Frontline staff union Unison fainted dead away, while the BMA said its members were rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of getting their hands on all that dosh.

A Patients’ Association spokesman commented, “What the fuck does all this grade-A horseshit mean in plain English? All we know for sure is that it’s squirting out of some Tory arse at a rate of knots, so presumably it’s got to be seriously bad news.”

Meanwhile, semi-retired Truro GP Dr Robin Pimms, 64, spoke for many in his profession, telling reporters at St Mellion’s fourteenth hole that he was “rather looking forward” to fiddling about with the budget of the Royal Cornwall Hospital for a couple of afternoons a week over an agreeable glass of sherry.