Petitio principii in defence of the NHS

One of the CEOs of one part of the National Health Service tells us that:

These are the advantages of a single, taxpayer-funded, national system. A system with a proper national and regional infrastructure to support local trusts to work together to meet collective patient need, free from the requirement to maximise individual organisational profit.

Ah, no, that is petitio principii, or begging the question. Assuming what it is necessary to prove.

Health systems everywhere have dealt with covid these past couple of years. It is possible that the NHS, with its centralised, single, taxpayer-funded and no profit motive, system has done better than others which do not share those attributes. It is also possible that it has done worse.

In order to praise that NHS structure - even to assume that it has done better - it is necessary to show that it has done better than those other systems with those different attributes. At which point, well, has it?

No evidence of any kind is presented. It is merely assumed that because the NHS is wondrous therefore the superb performance may be asserted and no actual reference to reality is required. This isn’t the way to prove anything.

It is now very clear that the NHS and our social care system do not have sufficient capacity. That asking staff to work harder and harder to address that gap is simply not sustainable. That we need a long-term, fully funded, workforce plan to attract and retain the extra 1 million health and care staff the Health Foundation estimates will be needed by 2031.

As a result that also rather fails. But then that should be obvious enough too. An insistence upon decade long plans to near double the workforce and also gain lots, lots, more money isn’t that innovative plan we’re all looking for to make even better what is already being assumed is the finest health care service in the world.

Chris Hopson is chief executive of NHS Providers

We’d also put forward the idea that management capable of such logical errors - and swathes of near mindless corporatespeak at the same time - might be one of the problems we all have with the NHS.