This is not going to be a cheery column, so let's start on an upbeat note. 'Flu crisis, what crisis?' says a page one headline in my local paper, The Brentford, Chiswick and Isleworth Times, this week. Reports of an epidemic, says the health authority's director, are 'wildly exaggerated'.
Well, you could have fooled Fleet Street - admittedly a not-impossible feat. And Frank Dobson allowed himself to confirm, during a ritual winter grilling on the Today programme: 'There is a crisis, I am not denying it.'
We all know the moves, as HSJ's editorial sharply pointed out last week. Newspapers which increasingly spend their time in a state of permanent outrage about one thing or another (I am particularly thinking of the Daily Mail here) rapidly exhaust their indignation against Peter Mandelson and Co. At this time of year, they turn to the NHS when they notice flu sweeping through the newsroom.
That triggers all the usual responses. We are close to annual decision time on the NHS pay awards, so the nurses make the legitimate point that the famous 'recruitment and retention' criteria (airily dismissed in the Bottomley-Dorrell era) are in trouble: they need more dosh.
We then get a spate of horror stories from wards all over Britain. 'Hospital blunder killed this little boy' and 'Meningitis struck so fast there was no time to call the doctor', let alone to call 999 - this year's special outrage when folk do it with a bad cold. The hysteria is whipped up further by tabloid photos of refrigerated lorries being used to house bodies and, that old favourite, trolleys in corridors. Broadsheet papers produce full- page specials.
All true, of course, but when I was a young reporter and an Alsatian dog killed a baby, half the Alsatians in the country seemed to be into copycat crime. Were they really? No, but baby-biting was suddenly in the news. As for staff shortages or the 'shaming' import of Filipina nurses - do we really pay only three times the rate in Manila? - the Mail is also the paper which campaigns against higher taxes and 'illegal' immigrants taking our jobs. Heyho.
What can the politicians do to make things better, not worse? Dobbo eagerly gets into a slanging match with Ann Widdecombe over Tory versus Labour recruitment policies and whose daft pledges to cut waiting lists did most harm. Lib Dems hop up and down on the sidelines. Unfortunately that's politics.
At least the health secretary has the virtue of taking it on the chin. 'We have been importing doctors and nurses for donkey's years. The whole of the developed world does it. In a sense it's an international disgrace,' the old leftie told Today. 'So you're accepting it's an international disgrace?' asked Jim Naughtie. 'I've just said it is,' Dobbo wearily replied.
He then hinted, as he has before, that he hopes to persuade Gordon Brown to pay the nurses their award without staging: 'I hope it's going to be good enough to recruit and retain.' He also promised a better career structure and actions to protect staff from patients. In passing he knocked down the Mail's 'scandal' about patients' families being asked to help nurses at a Portsmouth hospital. It was simply an 'if you can help' notice, Mr Dobson said. Few took offence.
Assorted posh pundits dig deep for blame. The Observer's Will Hutton says that PFI is reducing NHS bed numbers to even lower levels (though the high-tech US has fewer) and that nurses' pay has slipped from 85 to 76 per cent of average earnings. Across at the Sunday Times, Melanie Phillips complains that nurse training should be vocational, not academic: it drives away good carers.
One pundit wants higher taxes, the other more health insurance. But with all the money in the world available it would still be hard to cope with rising public expectations and ever-better and more costly cures. That applies to all healthcare systems, demand-led, mostly third-party funded by taxpayers or insurance premiums. We certainly need a public debate when the weather gets better.
Do people really dial 999 with a cold? Do they really? I still can't believe it. Fine the nitwits!
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