Muck in to help the sick NHS

THE FRIDAY THING
THE NHS is poorly. It must be bad because the Government is putting GPs in charge and is telling them to save £20 billion over the next four years. Expect to see giant “Don’t get sick” posters and ads on telly.

The easiest way to make sure you don’t get any nasty germs, of course, is to stop breathing in, but there might just be complications with that no matter how practiced at it you have become when lying next to the lumpy, gassy one by your side.

They could save money by making better use of all the visitors they get in hospitals. Visitors could, for instance, take in their own bedpans and meals (though not in the same Tesco shopping bag) for nearest and dearest to use and enjoy. Then there are those funny-shaped cardboard bottle things for Wikileaking in (if you get my drift).

Visitors could make and take in their own hospital gowns (though preferably without the draughty gap in the nether regions) and could even take in sheets and duvets from home, as well as aunty Edith’s old constipation pills from the bathroom cabinet.

And instead of sitting by the bedside looking at the wall and wondering what to say next, visitors could undertake a spot of dusting and cleaning and maybe even pushing the trolleys to X-ray or to the smoking area outside the front door.

With appropriate training visitors could even be used to pass on the odd scalpel and pitchfork to help out with operations and they could certainly join the dozens (or should that be hundreds) of folk running around with clipboards in the NHS’s burgeoning admin section.


IT’S comforting to know while we sit at home reading the Chronicle and keeping warm by candlelight; while thousands face redundancy and our homes are burgled by some scrote, released from jail by the barmy Pickwickian figure that is Kenneth Clarke, that millions are being spent to send our Euro-MPs on junkets to South Africa, Caribbean islands and other exotic spots where they enjoy first-class, five-star accommodation and are lavishly entertained.

And doesn’t it also warm the cockles of your heart at this time of festive chill that billions of pounds — £1.1 billion of it out of our pockets — are being spent on those countries who say they want to join the EU gravy train, even though they are so wracked with corruption that they haven’t a prayer?

Isn’t it just great being a European?


FINAL WORD: The Government is certainly cunning. It has lifted restrictions on what local authorities can spend their (in reality our) money on, but has given them millions (£30 million in Oldham’s case) less to spend. It’s like giving a child in a toyshop a fiver and telling him to buy what he likes. But he can’t afford the Xbox gismo and has to buy a ludo set instead.