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We’re consulting our people on the changes we know we need to make. Those of you who’ve done it will know this is the hardest part.Everyone’s been involved so far, everyone’s got ideas, everyone’s impatient to get on with it.
Most people think our ‘Strategy for the Future’ is on the right track, that it’s about time someone got WRVS by the scruff of its neck and gave it direction (as one correspondent put it). Others want answers to things that are genuinely not yet decided. And meanwhile – the Green Paper on Social Care in England gets closer – and we want to be ready to deliver personalised, cost effective, preventative services that will put older people in charge of their care. Only a little longer to go: for the paper and for us. Late Spring, wasn’t it?
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From The Charity Chief
Charity chief Lynne Berry is transforming volunteering stalwart WRVS into an organisation that helps older people get the support they need.
Readers' comments (2)
GEORGE CALDWELL | 6-Jun-2009 3:10 am
Change indeed.
People have forgotten what it used to be like.
Doctors "earned" their fees and most often gave their service for free to poorly paid patients.
Doctors were not Civil Servants then, before 1948.
In 1945 their BMA agreed that there should be "No Salaried Service" and what did we get?
A mammoth parasitic unqualified bureaucracy that costs more than the doctors.
Medicine should be satisfying and fun.
There was an association then with an excellent Midwife and District Nursing service with well-quualified nurses retired from hospital work.
There is great satisfaction to be obtained by working all hours and "earning" one's income, being paid for each item of service rendered.
All the NHS needed to do from the beginning was to accept and pay each doctor's bill on presentation. There would then be no problem with doctors not working at weekends for an extra fee or doing those night calls.
Today it could be done with the swipe of a plastic Medical Card (instead of an Identity Card) and a doctor's account could be quickly and instantly credited.
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Mary Hawking | 6-Jun-2009 7:31 am
George Caldwell does seem to have a rosy view of General Practice before the NHS: life was never like that!
I'm also not clear about the relevance of the structure of GP services to the work of the WRVS - the subject of this article: perhaps you would like to elaborate?
My experience as a GP is that even when I was on call 24/7, the services my patients needed were not: since then - and long after it was realised that even GPs cannot keep up working 24/7 for very long without cracking - a service has been developed locally to provide intermediate care out of hours: nothing to do with GPs, everything to do with the financial cost of unscheduled admissions.
The right type of help at the right time does improve the quality of life for everyone - especially if older, or in difficult circumstances: good luck to the WRVS!
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