Dismantling of the UK Health Services

I was in London last week.

I went to see my friend Pam at her home. She has worked as a children's doctor and before her retirement, she was heading the Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) course at the London School of Child Health. She told me that she had been in the hospital for back pain and her experience in the hospital. She saw the doctors only on the day of her admission. After that for the next two and half weeks, she never saw her house officer.

The British NHS, national health services had such a great reputation with people coming from all over the world to benefit from the British standard of medical care. So, I was wondering what has happened to it?

In the night, I was watching the the news on BBC in my hotel room. It mentioned a guy called Mr. Gonsalez, who had killed many persons and the court has sentenced him to a mandatory prison for life. There was also an interview with the grandmother of Mr. Gonsalez, who explained that if her grandson was guilty, the state was equally guilty. She had been complaining about the deterioration in the psychological condition of her grandson for months without any response from social services or the psychiatric services. In one of the letters, she had even written, "Would you do something only when he kills someone?".

In the morning, flying back to Bologna, I saw the headlines in the newspaper, a private hospital in London is "forced to cut 1000 jobs because of lack of funds".

I was wondering that according to the magazines like The Economist, UK has the most booming economy in Europe, so how can this happen there? While rest of Europe is fighting recession, only UK seems to be going strong, then why do they need to cut their health service so drastically? The quality of the health services, though I am sure that they are not so bad, but these stories sound more like government hospital services in India.

I am also afraid for our health care services in Italy. With all these magic words of greater efficiency, reducing wastage of resources, more autonomy and privatization in the policy makers, the future does not seem very bright for the right to health. Actually, the quality of health services in Italy seems to be really good, perhaps one of the best in the world, but I think that it does not bring them the kind of money they want.

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I have a new Hindi-English-Italian photo-blog, Chayachitrakar. There are mornings, when I don't feel like writing much. It would be simpler to stick in a nice picture and it will be done. That is the logic behind it. I have just one camera, a digital kodak, and I don't know about apertures and time of exposure, etc. I can't even take very sophisticated pictures and I don't like special effects, most of the time. But I think that my pictures have good human angle. May be that is not very modest, but I like the pictures I take!

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