God bless that ringfence….

Being the rather sad ‘poli-geek’ that I am I visited the Department of Health website this morning to see if I could find out exactly when the coalition’s NHS white paper will be available. No joy on that but look what I did find on the ‘contact information’ page:

4 speechwriters on the NHS payroll eh? And before anyone jumps to their defence referencing media handling duties etc. I counted 35+ media / press officer type roles on the same page NOT counting those above.

Granted, it’s a huge department and I’m not suggesting every penny of NHS funding is spent on frontline care but the above just illustrates how ludicrous and unfair it is to ring-fence health spending. As per an earlier post of mine on public spending, we need to be able to have grown up conversations and acknowledge it’s perfectly possible to cut spending in the NHS with absolutely no detrimental impact to patient care.