00:00www.mesmerism.info
00:30It started when Margaret Thatcher started contracting out domestics and porters and laundry services.
00:38And again, just the process of administering, asking people to put in bid for contracts,
00:43costs money in and of itself to write the contract for what you want, rather than just have domestics doing
00:48the cleaning.
00:49But then to win the contract, you have to put the cheapest bid in.
00:53So the ward I worked on at the time, we had two full-time cleaners on in the morning and
00:58a part-time cleaner on in the evening.
01:00When I finished at the hospital, I had a half a cleaner on in the morning and then one between
01:07about ten wards in the evening.
01:09It wasn't cheaper when people get MRSA and infections, which then might cost the whole of what you've saved on
01:16the contract,
01:16on one person if they're in intensive care.
01:19I mean, there was a real feeling of ownership about the NHS when it started.
01:23People felt that they were doing it themselves, that it was their possession, and they've lost that.
01:28So the cost of running the health service, the admin costs, was about 6% before that started.
01:34And then they moved up to about 12%.
01:36And now they're heading in the direction of American costs for running the health service, anything between 18%, 20%, 25%.
01:43You can see the politicians have chosen to waste a huge amount of money on marketising the service.
01:49I've got a big picture of Nuremberg, and I looked at it every day, and I think, where are the
01:54people?
01:55And what he says is, all the time, the people have got the faith to fight for it, and we've
01:59been out in the streets,
02:00and people said, they'll never privatise NHS, why are you getting so up the wall?
02:04Well, they won't do that, and people just didn't believe they would do it.
02:09It seems to me the sort of blindness of the enormous advances that have been made in British medicine as
02:15a result of the NHS.
02:17I mean, there are many things that have taught the rest of the world, so far as the NHS was
02:21concerned.
02:22This was a very inventive organisation with lots of new initiatives.
02:29I do hope we don't go down the American system of whereby the first thing you met, as you come
02:35in with broken legs or whatever,
02:38with someone with a clipboard who says, are you insured?
02:41When there's money there, the private sector's very happy to be in there, taking the cash, thank you very much,
02:46and paying its shareholders.
02:48And when the money isn't there anymore, as we saw locally, after only a couple of years of involvement in
02:52primary care, they were off.
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