None so blind as those who cannot see the NHS needs reform
CONGRATULATIONS to the clever scientists at Oxford Eye hospital and King’s College hospital who have invented bionic eyes for the blind.
What we should also reflect upon is that these hugely welcome and exciting medical and surgical advances are precisely what put such a strain on the NHS.
Before there was no hip replacement surgery there was no queue for hip replacements. We are now seeing daily in our hospitals procedures that would have been science fiction to the founding fathers of the nhs, which was never
designed to cope with the level of demand it now faces and will increasingly face in the future.
Our health service was designed in the age of the medical horse and cart
That is why it is childish to imagine that the service must be immune from reform and can somehow carry on functioning in the same way.
Our health service was designed in the age of the medical horse and cart, galloped until it metamorphosed into a Rolls-Royce and is now the medical equivalent of a space rocket. its handling requires sense not sentimentality and we must wake up to that before it is too late.