HEWITT WASHES HER HANDS OF NHS

GOD knows what the qualifications are these days for a Government Minister but Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt ain't got 'em.

And judging from some of her recent pronouncements, she must be raiding NHS coffers for mind-altering drugs if she actually believes the patronising tripe she came out with last week.

First, her advice to anyone panicking about bird flu: Wash your hands regularly as people apparently underestimate the value of this.

OK, so we could be on the verge of a worldwide pandemic and the advice from Britain's Health Secretary is to wash your hands! Then, to compound her idiocy, she claimed that closing NHS beds is actually a sign of success because it means fewer people need care.

Does she think we're all as daft as she is? Does she think the people of this country, who sadly can't afford private medicine - unlike our politicians and our GPs - are likely to swallow that nonsense?

Does she think we don't feel the effects of ward closures and thousands of NHS staff being given the boot on a weekly basis? I wonder if Mrs Hewitt has ever actually visited any of our cash trapped hospitals. More importantly, has she ever been turned away from one of them because there are no beds and no staff?

Have any of her children died, I wonder, having been taken to one of our inadequately-staffed A & E units and told to go home because there's nothing wrong with them? Only to find a few hours later the child is dead because doctors hadn't had the time to examine them properly.

I suspect the answer is a big fat no to all of the above. Yet this Government - which seems incapable of making possible the relatively simple task of keeping hospital wards clean - is at great pains to tell us that bed closures are something to be celebrated. " The NHS is changing," says Mrs Hewitt.

"People's needs are changing."

No, Mrs Hewitt, people's needs remain constant. They need to feel that when they or their children or the people they love are taken seriously ill there is a hospital bed for them, a hospital that isn't 200 miles away.

And they need to know there are enough competent doctors to treat them. It's hardly a comfort to know that in the last 12 months the NHS has announced 24,000 job losses - 900 of which are in Mrs Hewitt's own constituency.

Still, if we all just keep washing our hands everything will be fine!

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