Health matters

I was interested to read in a recent DT that Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Health, the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt does stints as an incognito ward orderly or some such.

Now while I might think that what he his doing to the NHS is very wrong and quite unnecessarily destructive, my first thought was good for him. It can only be healthy for a chief executive to get to see what the grunts on the ground have to do; something which, I believe, is quite the thing in the private sector. So the boss of Tesco's will put in a bit of time, from time to time, as a check out lady or a shelf stacker.

My second thought was that maybe it is just a publicity stunt which will just create extra work for the regulars on the ward which he orders, it being hard to treat such a person in the more or less natural way you might treat a real ward orderly on a real orderly's wages. Furthermore, there is the danger of a little knowledge being dangerous: Mr. Hunt might start lecturing his professional help about how wards should be run on the basis of two afternoons a quarter.

On the first point, modern politicians are usually (but what about our late leader, Mr. Brown?) very good with people, particular the people: tucking into pies with the chaps at football matches, knocking back the grits at netball. The younger Bush was said to be an absolute wow at this last. So maybe it is not a point at all. And I have heard that Mr. Branson's troops think that he is a wow too, despite his being on my personal hate list (a list which also includes, amongst others, Mr. Dyson of cleaning tornado fame and that other Jeremy, Paxo, from University Challenge and the Garrick Club (failed)).

On the second point, his CV at http://www.jeremyhunt.org/ tells me that he is a very able man, whatever he might be doing in his day job. He is said to have learnt Japanese while working over there. He has built his own business in the past. So he might be arrogant and far too sure that he is right; but I am not sure that this has anything to do with his ordering of wards.

So maybe am I back with my first thought.

Rather different is the case of the so-called investigators from Channel 4 who masquerade as trainee NHS call centre operators and then blow the whistle for our entertainment. They would no doubt argue that without this kind of deception one is never going to learn the truth about the awful goings on in these places. But I worry about the erosion of standards in a world where telling lies, perhaps over a period of some weeks, to your employer and to your colleagues is OK. I look back to those good old days when decent citizens would not tell a lie, whatever good intentions had been used to pave the road to hell.

So on this one, I am neuter. Uneasy, but not enough information to go on to go any further and I am not going to waste quality time consuming the entertainment in question.