Copperfield lambasts the health secretary’s latest idea to ‘make the money go further’
You know how annoying earworms are? Well, I have an eyeworm, and I need to exorcise it. It’s Wes Streeting’s comment on budget-adjacent new investment to cut waiting lists: ‘We’re sending crack teams of top surgeons to hospitals across the country, to reform how they run their surgeries, treat more patients, and make the money go further.’ Just 28 words, but requiring about 400 for catharsis.
So, ‘a crack team of top surgeons’. Wes, mate, either you’re auditioning to be a tabloid sub or your AI quote generator is having a larff. Crack teams? I thought most surgical support teams these days comprise anaesthesia associates and an outsourced secretary who never picks up the phone? Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood and, as part of the efficiency drive, these surgeons are all going to be on crack cocaine.
And ‘top surgeons’. What the hell is a ‘top surgeon’? Is that ‘top half’ as in upper GI, thorax and breast? Meaning we can look forward to a ‘crack team of bottom surgeons’ to clear the colorectal queue? Or is Wes suggesting there is some kind of surgeon ranking system, perhaps based on the London address of their private consulting rooms?
Oh, and if there really are crack teams of top surgeons™ – where are they, who’s going to do their day-jobs, and, if they’re that damn good, how is their remuneration going to square with ‘making the money go further’?
As for reforming surgery and treating more patients, that must give a warm glow to the existing service. What’s the implication? That the incumbent surgeons are so dumb they can’t remember what side the appendix is on? Or that they’re so slow the patient’s woken from the GA by the time they’ve scrubbed up?
Politicians actually tried this top-down trick in general practice once, so long ago I can’t even find it on the web. Genuinely: they nominated ‘beacon practices’ to dispense wisdom and act as pathfinders, illuminating the way for us GP dullards. We responded as any egalitarian system does when a hierarchy is imposed: we burned those practices down, which is when the ‘beacon’ bit started to make sense.
So, just 28 words, but enough to suggest a cluelessness about problem-solving, an insensitivity to those stressed by the system and an inclination to blame under-performance rather than under-resourcing, all conveyed in playground-level language.
If they really do want crack teams of top surgeons swooping in, then get them to storm (SAS-style) the House of Commons. They could usefully do some transplants, and you can probably work out what organ.
Dr Tony Copperfield is a GP in Essex.
Does sound like Wes fell off his high chair and banged his head bingeing on action movies. “We got ourselves a sitooation, boys, one for the Surgical Waitlist Action Team. SWAT’ll clear up this fubar, yippee ki yay mothercluckers.”
He’s not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Somebody please smack his bottie (if that’s still lawful)…
I thought his previous comments when he had just read the Lady Bird book on Public Health were even better. You know the one where we give fat people free injections and transform them into thin motivated people who will then go and get top jobs ( maybe as surgeons) and earn lots of money and this will drive growth in the economy .
Really neat analysis of another one of Wes’s idiotic statements.
I think he is infatuated with surgeons and feels they can solve all problems. Little does he know about how limited surgeons are as doctors….