NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

Making It Precisely That
Free To All
David Cameron Disability Pension

 

 

A Free To All National Health Service

 

A continuing and repetitive theme that we desperately need to re-examine amongst all our public services, is that we cannot hope to develop them and bring them through to the successful and internationally enviable services that they once were, or indeed services that were once a pleasure and an honour to work in, without the vital element of managerial control.

In essence, and certainly as the absolute most crucial starting point, we need to have all our people, all our public service staff, in the right place, at the right time, and all the time during the working day.

Any work force needs effective managers, most importantly, at the point of the service being provided – in the case of the NHS, that means on the wards. And, one of the manager’s primary responsibilities is to make sure that those people under his/her responsibility are where they are supposed to be, and doing what they are supposed to be doing, at all times during the working day.

The abandonment of this principle in many parts of the Public Sector has created a situation whereby nobody is now responsible for anybody’s inactivity, under performance, or indeed non-appearance. In this way, the biggest majority in our public services, the concientious hard working majority, are rendered ineffective by the minority, who are abdicating their managerial responsibilities.

Senior health service practitioners should be encouraged to choose between the National Health Service and being a private practitioner, as indeed the Nurses do already, and have done so for many years. They can either work for the National Health Service, or they can work for the private health services.

If they want to work for both, then that may well be acceptable to the employer concerned (the hospital), but only provided that no conflicts of professionalism can occur, and provided that their private work is done in their own private time.

Eliminating infectious diseases in our hospitals is not rocket science. If they don’t know how to do it, I do, and I am perfectly happy to tell them. Alternatively they can go to pretty well any hospital in the developed nations of Continental Europe and find out for themselves.

They will discover that it is largely to do with management responsibility at the point of health provision (on the wards), cleanliness, disposable uniforms for everyone, including visitors, and restricted visiting hours. 

This in turn, will also mean that when senior staff are at work, dressed in their disposable uniforms, they will then have to stay there all day, which may well be a bit of a challenge for some people at the very top of our National Health Services.

 

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David Cameron wants to re-assess those who claim The State Disability Pension – 5/10/2009

 

David Cameron has announced at the weekend that he would like those who are claiming The State Disability Pension to be medically re-assessed as he obviously believes that there are many such claimants who are not ill (enough?) and who should not therefore be claiming this benefit.

I am quite sure that he is correct in his assumption. In my career as an Independent Financial Adviser, over 28 years, I met many people who were claiming disability benefit, who were probably not really ill enough to be entitled to it.

However, there are a number of problems in the application of this new David Cameron policy, not the least of which is the fact that all the claimants concerned will all have been seen by their own Doctors, and all of them have been readily signed off by their Doctors as too sick to work.

So, who exactly is going to make this further medical assessment, and then make the decision to overrule our medical practitioners? Furthermore, as any Doctor will tell you, any such medical prognosis is bound by the Doctors own professional opinion and conjecture.

The fact is that a medical diagnosis, especially one concerning an individual’s inability to work, is subject to the fundamental fallibility of Medicine.

Medicine is not an exact science.

For instance, as any medical practitioner will tell you, some of the most difficult medical complaints to prove, one way or another, are those to do with the patients claim to have a “bad back” or some sort of nervous disability.

In addition to the obvious constraints in trying to prove the reality of a patient’s claimed affliction, is the fact that an individual’s ability to work is often more to do with that person’s actual desire to work in the first place.

So, once again, a good political ideal and a perfectly correct identification of a problem, but absolutely no chance whatsoever of instigating a practical and effective solution.

In reality, the best we can hope for is some sort of a continuous and simple reassessment of the claimant by the medics, who inevitably will be the same medics who signed the individual off work in the first place. Other than that, the only other possibility is bolstering the existing teams who investigate suspected fraudulent disability claims, all of which is very time consuming and almost as expensive as paying the claim in the first place.

However, there is another, and an even bigger problem – a problem that makes false claims for State Disability Benefits pale into complete and utter insignificance.

Most of us in this country are aware of other people who used to work in our public services (Councils, Medical Professions, Police and Education), and who have successfully claimed early retirement, due to their apparent ill health. Many, if not most, such early retirements have been awarded on index linked pensions, which have been fully enhanced to their normal retirement date by adding numerous years of un-served service and which include taking their tax free lump sum, and yet the people concerned subsequently seem to run around the place like rejuvenated spring lambs.

The cost to the taxpayer of this sort of massive misappropriation of public funds is truly enormous in comparison to the lowly claimant of State Disability Benefits.

False early retirements in the Public Sector are regularly achieved through all the usual fictitious medical ailments that cannot be accurately diagnosed, but also because of the reluctance of the managers in our Pubic Services to dismiss people for not doing their job properly. For the managers, who usually also know the claimant personally, it is much easier and less problematic for them to award early retirement rather than processing a dismissal.

I even know of cases, of very highly paid public servants, who were made redundant one week, with all the redundancy pay that you could shake a stick at, and then awarded an early retirement pension the very next week. Good ruse eh?

In case you think that I am over stating the problem, let me just say that, through my career as an Independent Finacial Adviser, I personally know of dozens and dozens of such early retirement cases, often involving tens of thousands of pounds in annual index linked pension benefits and huge amounts in tax free lump sums.

“David – If we are really going to deal with the relatively lowly issue of the false claimant for State Disability Benefit, then we must also deal with the huge numbers of false early retirements in the Public Sector.

I suspect that you will fear that this may not be an electoral winner for you, but I think you might be surprised at how many people, both inside and outside the Public Sector, who are a) fully aware of the problem and b) who would support you in putting an end this particular “fraudulent” gravy train.

Quite apart from the huge savings to the Country’s purse, which would be counted in tens of £billions, do we really think that it is fair for Public Servants to continue taking early retirement in their 50s and early60s when the rest of us have to wait to age 65 or even 67, as you seem now to be suggesting?”