There has been so much news today it can be hard to work out what the main story is.
- The former French president has been sentenced to Jail
- Rouge virus roaming the streets of the UK
- Amazing vaccine results
- Scottish government promise to release more papers before tomorrow
But I think the story that made most news was that of Prince Philip being taken to Barts hospital. What? Why is that news? I hear the republicans ask.
The reason it is news to me is it brings up the issue of incomplete private heath care. Up to now he has been in an amazing private hospital, but there is a complication – and so the NHS takes over. One way of looking at this is that the private health care has taken some of the load off the NHS. But is that right.
Look at it from business terms, are the private hospitals just doing the high profit jobs and relying on the NHS to do all the back breaking hard work that doesn’t make big bucks? Is that a bad thing? Well, in times when we are short of medical staff is it right to have them tied up in private health care?
In the pandemic should we have sequestered the private health care staff to support the NHS pandemic response? And yes I do know there are cases where this has happened, but really, how much private medicine should be going on during a pandemic?