What happened on 25th June 2023 - with your comments in the Web

On Sunday, a study has found that people in the UK are less likely to survive treatable conditions, such as breast cancer and stroke, than those in other rich nations.

The review, by the King's Fund think tank, said the problem may be directly linked to the performance of the NHS.It said below-average spending on the UK health service led to fewer staff and equipment than systems elsewhere.

But the study showed the NHS was very efficient within its budget, with less cash spent on admin than other nations. The government says the NHS is one of the most efficiently run healthcare systems, and that investment is happening to further improve services.

Ahead of the 75th anniversary of the creation of the NHS next month, the think tank compared the UK's health service with the performance of 18 other health systems, including those in Europe as well as Japan, the US and Australia.

Redditors found facts in the article quite arguable:

"The article suggests that admin=inefficiency. I would argue output per £1 spent is a better one. Probably not possible with healthcare though - the only way to improve outcomes is "do more stuff"and for that you need people to do the stuff and places for the stuff to be done."

"The amount of money spent on admin might not be a useful comparison. Presumably spending more money on admin takes it out of the hands of medical staff, freeing them up to do medicine. So a high admin spend might be useful."

"It depends on how that admin work is handled. Admin can be a very laborious process but it is also an area that’s ripe for technological advancement and automation. A good admin system can reduce the amount of labour needed drastically.

If the admin system hasn’t been streamlined, with automation features added where possible then I’d say yes, we are wasting money."

"Well when you demonise and demoralise staff, cut funding any way possible, cut training so you have huge vacancy pools, make importing talent from the EU harder, add a finical barrier to training, cut bed spaces, close wards or whole hospitals, rip out rehabilitation units, while simultaneously gutting social care, remove services, decimate the mental health provision, give contracts to entities that have zero idea what they are doing because your mate has some interest, add over zealous and sometimes blatantly racist governing bodies, and so on so forth.

Is there any surprise this is the result?"

Comedian Ben Elton launched an astonishing attack on Rishi Sunak on the BBC on Sunday – accusing the PM of being a “narcissistic sociopath” and urging viewers to kick the Conservatives out.

The left-wing comic sparked a fresh row with the Tories by using an appearance on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg to accuse Mr Sunak of spouting an “Orwellian word salad” and arguing that he was just as “mendacious” as Boris Johnson. Ms Kuenssberg appeared taken aback by Mr Elton’s blistering tirade, as the anti-Tory rant risked plunging the corporation into another major controversy about alleged political bias.

Responding to Mr Sunak’s interview with the host on the inflation crisis, the NHS and events in Russia, Mr Elton dismissed the PM’s remarks as an “Orwellian, meaningless, evasive word salad”. The Labour-supporting comic and author said: “Everyone wanted to believe – and I sort of wanted to believe – that maybe he’s kind of a bit more decent [than Boris Johnson].”

He added: “It turns out he’s just as much of a mendacious, narcissistic sociopath as his previous boss.”

 There was quite a number of sarcastic comments about this news.

"Please don't you know that you cannot tell the truth about the tories or you risk breaking impartiality rules?" - "Only pro-Brexit supporters are allowed to comment freely on the situation"

"But you can lie about Labour and the EU and it's balance!" - "Only if you told and equally bad one about both."

 "If there was a Question Time special on submarine safety, the audience would no-doubt be full of people defending OceanGate's approach to sub design."

"So all the tories have as a rebuttal is to call Elton a 'Champagne socialist'? As I believe Engels once said 'Why shouldn't socialists drink champagne?'."

And the Mirror correspondents found the mountain of dumped Covid PPE blighting this beauty spot includes batches that helped a couple rake in an ­estimated £1.9billion of taxpayer cash.

Unopened boxes of gowns, gloves and masks later found to be unsafe due to incorrect storage were sold to the Government by Sarah and Richard Stoute in the single largest pandemic PPE contract.

Before Covid struck, their firm Full Support Healthcare only made a relatively modest profit. The Stoutes are since said to have since embarked on a spending spree, buying a £30million Caribbean villa, an equestrian centre and a country mansion in the south of England for £6m.

The pair also own a £1m superyacht. And last month Mrs Stoute – an NHS nurse turned saleswoman – shared on Facebook a photo of herself in a designer dress worth thousands of pounds. 

 There were several opinions on this data.

"So the government bought this equipment, stored it incorrectly, and now has had to dump it. This is hardly surprising, the entire tendering process was ignored to speed up delivery. Low and behold ignoring that process meant the government fucked up. This sort of thing is inevitable when people were demanding all the PPE this second."

"How can plastic be incorrectly stored to the point of going from useable to substandard. I think i smell a rat here. When the Stoutes realised that they could rake in £1.9bn, from the government, they took their chance with already substandard products and now thwyre living a luxury life at the exoense if the taxpayer. In my opinion. Well...karma has a way of repaying crime and injustice.lets see what happens."

"Bumbling butthead Boris the buffoon has hundreds of thousands of deaths on his hands….yet he’s still swanning about..still lying about everything and still a pathetic excuse for a human being"

"But still the British people bend over and take it up the Harris, it’s our money and people still do nothing. "

"Its crazy the number of large established PPE companies already in the NHS supply chain who have come out and said their emails and inquiries were ignored while the government set up this "VIP lane" and still somehow this myth persists that it was not the VIP lane but just the general rush (due to pressure from the public, nothing to do with the Tories of course) that caused all these problems. Unbelievable isn't it."