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Andrew Kitching's avatar

You do wonder, with the voter ID thing, if the Tories have hit inadvertently on a selection advantage for the Lib Dems.

I think, certainly for mayoral elections, all the opposition parties should insist on a change back to a preferential system. Electing someone with significant executive power on a third of the vote doesn’t lead to policy making with community consensus

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Adrian Webster's avatar

.. apologies for precipitate comment .. I’ll be brief ...

.. inadequate lense through which to observe the problems of the NHS.

Lots of people won’t like this - including many from my ‘tribe’ on the liberal centre left - but we have to be willing to contemplate new models for the national health service. But I see no signs of Starmer’s getting a grip on this.

There is a general acceptance at senior levels of the NHS & the medical establishment generally that the government is set on privatising the NHS by one means it another.

We are training doctors and nurses but not giving them enough hands on supervision in their early careers. Consultants are absent doing private work. Clinical decisions are woefully slow and risk averse as a result. Triage rates in A&E speed up tenfold when consultants step into the trenches.

Nurses are ill served by the move from bursaries and nursing college to university & debt.

On the shop (hospital) floor staff are undermanaged and allowed to forget that they should be driven by their caring vocation not by employment demarcation. This is partly to blame for the fact that patients are routinely left unhydrated or in soiled linen.

Procurement practices, hospital food, and lack of adoption of successful /

best practices elsewhere in the service are all a disgrace.

I’m as keen as anyone on seeing nurses and junior doctors well (better) paid, but this won’t on its own make the service better or safer.

The NHS needs root and branch rethinking- and not by politicians.

I strongly advocate the establishment by the next Labour government of a Royal Commission with a brief to propose the best way forward disregarding politics and dogma, and preferably setting it on course to be operationally independent of governments.

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