Monday, October 27, 2008

Patient Satisfaction Scores

Would NHS patient feedback schemes be required if funding followed the patient and poor quality hospitals were allowed to fail!?!
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Disagree on this one. I am generally pro free market but that's a bit of a waste of buildings etc isn't it?

The free market is not magic, it only works when the one factor that makes it work is present, that providing good service & value to the customer can boost profits. All this "internal markets" stuff started by Thatcher and continued by Blair was nonsensical dogma and a lot to do with the fact that we now have such overbloated hospital management costs.

There cannot a free market in mass provision of health care as the great majority of patients do not pay directly and state control is the only real option.

This scheme might be ok if it generally injected free market principles by getting the customer back into the equation and effecting, not profits, but the jobs and pay of the hospital staff.

The bug in that is of course the way public sector rules and unions protect incompetence, a big issue that needs sorting. The public sector could work, it just needs a government with the will and guts to make it happen.

10:36 am
Snafu said...

Xoggoth, I do tend to agree with you. All this public consultation and consumer satisfaction surveys are merely a bureaucratic sop to customers voting with their feet.

Far too few public sector workers are sacked for incompetence, especially within the Police!

9:36 pm

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