Author Archives: Bob Wootton

I have worked in the NHS, in various jobs, from 1986 until 2006. I started as a physio department porter, then night telephonist, occasional CSSD storesman, domestic assistant in Stoke-on-Trent, and then as a student nurse in Hull. I flunked the Health Promotion section of the Foundation examinations.

I was then a nursing assistant working with the elderly mentally ill until the hospital closed and I was made redundant. The policy was to move patients out of institutional hospitals into the community. My last job in the NHS was as a domestic assistant in North Devon District Hospital.

There are two relatively recent policy changes that have, in my view, messed up the NHS. The first is Margaret Thatcher’s decision to bring ‘the market’ into the NHS. Second, is the system of Nurse Training.

But there is also a third aspect that also messes up the healthcare system: the way it was structured when the NHS was created in the first place. No-one in particular is to blame for this. Our politicians and doctors did not have the skills and knowledge that is available now to construct a timely and responsive sytem that reacts to the clinical and psychological healthcare needs of the patients/clients as they arise.

Winning power for the Liberal Democrats to form the next Government will depend on three main policy platforms.

First, ‘Making Poverty History’for the individuals and families in this country. Second, an effective NHS that delivers healthcare where it is needed and when it is needed; not a gravy train for employing administrators. And third, to maximise the freedom and security of our citizens while being in effective control of the country. Paradoxically, this will entail dismantling our 19th century bureaucracies and scrapping unnecessary regulation.

These policy platforms directly impact on peoples’ lives, unlike the issues of climate change and whether or not to renew Trident, important as those issues are.

As an individual – which for the government is the primary source of all data and information – passes through the health system, the education system; gets a job and enters the taxation system; loses a job and enters the benefit system; gets ill, and back into the healthcare system; starts a business, and gets more involved with the taxation system; retires and becomes part of the pension system: no wonder our government systems are overloaded. You have to multiply that one citizen by 60 million!

I have spent most of my life in poverty.