To ask how you feel about the NHS?

[AnotherEffingOrangeRevel]

"A new mandate to NHS England is due to be published following the completion of the Spending Review, to take effect from April 2016."

We have ONLY TILL THE 24TH NOVEMBER to comment on this mandate (link below).

www.gov.uk/government/consultations/setting-the-mandate-to-nhs-england-for-2016-to-2017

It's not well publicised (surprise surprise), as the article below points out:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline

If you want to have your say, get in there now. Don't let them sneak it past us!

I have an email asking me to submit a question for Jezza. Any thoughts on how to frame it?

Here are my questions for Dave and Jezza H:

I would like to know why the NHS consultation document was so poorly written? The questions on the response form were ambiguous and vague and no one could understand them let alone answer them. Why was the document not presented to the media for discussion? Why was it not made available in every GP's surgery, pharmacy and hospital in England? I only found out via the Guardian website a week before the response deadline. So many people were unaware of the discussion or that they could contribute and voice their concerns about the future of our NHS. As far as I can see, it was only available online which precluded many people without internet access. Please can you explain why that happened because there are a lot of elderly people like my mam 85 who had no say whatsoever?

I really have no confidence in your proposals for changes to the NHS.

Submitted to What would you like to ask David Cameron?

A ray of hope? Let's wait and see.

NHS to get above-inflation £3.8bn cash boost next year

Hard to tell.

There's this huge sleight of hand going on at the moment, where responsibility for the "social care" end of healthcare gets shunted around.

It did belong to councils, who used some central govt funds. Then Osborne cut funds to councils, who in turn cut social care. Things are in train to make social care the NHS's responsibility (funded from where?), but last week Osborne announced local councils can raise local taxes for social care.

So it's a dog's dinner.

I would expect to see a large "increase" in the NHS budget, as social care is transferred. And I would expect this to be trumpeted as increased support for the NHS. I would also expect the total budget for healthcare and social care to have decreased or failed to keep pace with the rise in elderly population, when compared with pre-cuts.

The cuts to social care may be what kills the NHS. Hospitals simply can't discharge.

Meanwhile preventative medicine, which was a natural part of an integrated NHS, was actually left out of the original framework for the fragmented, NHS-as-an-umbrella-brand-for-multiple-different-companies. Because (crudely) if your business model is to make a profit treating diabetes, why would you want to prevent it?

Preventative medicine has now, IIUC, been dumped on the local councils.

Bump

Sadly too late now, Leaning.

"Till the 24th" meant it closed at 23:45 on the 23rd...

Not too late for your question for PMQ, though.

Ah bum. Sorry! I blame the vagaries of the consultation document not my own inability to read dates and times...