NHS Watchdog spends your money on taxis

MONITOR is tasked to secure NHS value for money

Yet its chief spends £25 a time on taxis to commute

short hop across bridge

Baroness Hannam, Monitor’s Chairman of the NHS watchdog supposed to secure value for taxpayers’ money, spends £25 a time on taxi journeys of less than a mile to hop between her offices in the House of Lords (whose members get a daily expenses allowance) to travel to Monitor’s offices just across Westminster Bridge.

The Bridge supposedly that “earth has not anything to show more fair”.  Yet the Baroness scorns advice of her employer, NHS, to exercise more for health – and walk across it. Now, someone has “whistleblown”, and Monitor is “urgently reviewing” its expenses policy.

Hannam’s excuse? She WAS “horrified” and “didn’t know”,  rings a bit false, when for years she was a Councillor of Kensington and Chelsea Council, so one assumes she got to know London very well.

The Baroness apparently clocked up a bill of almost £1,000 in two months for the short journeys across the Thames, on 38 trips between the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and Monitor’s HQ, the regulator of NHS foundation trusts, in Waterloo.

 A journey that normally would take less than 10 minutes walking.

One wonders why NHS big wigs don’t take their own advice, and WALK.

Doctors could be wrong – don’t worry if they can’t help with skin conditions

Can’t work out why your skin itches?

 

When introduced to Tamoxifen, I woke up one morning to find I was bleeding all over from bloody  blisters.  This had been an extreme reaction to the drug, explained by doctors as “it’s your age”.  Luckily the hospital Chaplain suggested I went off to France, where they admitted this was a common side-effect from Tamoxifen – and gave me superb creams and balms to sort out the problem.

Flat Earth Society

The earth is round

Christopher Columbus had to go to extreme, and expensive measures, to prove ’tis so,  But when reading the pronouncements coming out of the stuffed shirt, tie-less politicians in Dept. Health in Richmond Towers, that meddle with the NHS, I think there are a lot of the original dinosaurs still around.

Questions need to be asked about NHS – and perhaps case of Ashya King will bring these out

Hurrah – Ashya’s parents are free

But at what cost?

• How much did the ridiculous Police hunt across Europe, pursuing the family of Ashya King cost the British taxpayer?
• How dare Cameron bolt the stable door, and now offer a cancer expert to advise the family?
• and Why can’t EVERYONE IN BRITAIN have the same expertise offered when they need it – not just after a massive media campaign?
• And why did a massive NHS organisation waste so much time hounding the King family, when all they had to do was listen to the father’s very reasonable requestsWatch the family on YouTube, see for yourself, and decide it this isn’t a very articulate, caring and intelligent family, well able to ask Oncologists questions, which they seemed reluctant to answer.

Ashya – NHS too arrogant to help?

Will the NHS learn from this case – or will more patients be at risk?

Amongst all themedia hype, two aticles stand out.

The Daily Telegraph devotes its main page to Dr. Max Pemberton.  Pemberton is respected amongst medical journalists, and his weekly Health Feature is usually widely quoted.  He always speaks sense, and he has made me think with his article “Ashya Belongs in Britain”.  I don’t  in gree with what he says, but his is the first British medical voice that has come up with sensible, non-self justifiying comment on this sad case.

NHS PR loses out big time over Ashya

Public Questions NHS Big Brother approach over little cancer patient

A frightened 5 year old lies in a hospital bed, denied visits from his family, whilst his parents languish in jail waiting to hear what are their bail conditions.

Meantime the clock is ticking down on the 4 months doctors say this little boy has left to live.

When the story of Ashya King first broke,  (he was suffering from a form of cancer in University Hospital, Southampton), at first public opinion seemed to be on the side of NHS.   The Public believed that

when a child was suffering, the NHS would be the body to treat them.

But then public opinion, aided by Social media, comments on TV shows such as The Wright Stuff, and unease that seemed to be expressed by the spokesman for police called in by the hospital to search for the little boy after his father had removed him from hospital – swung the other way.