Vince Cable: My lost appendix - and what it taught me about the NHS

10.57.00am BST (GMT +0100) Wed 17th Jun 2009

• [Jun 13] Vince Cable writes: 'LAST weekend, when the heart was being ripped out of Gordon Brown's Government by angry voters, I was having bits of my insides cut out by surgeons … … '

' . . My wife later overheard a conversation: 'I can't believe it! We've actually got an MP here on the NHS.' It is quite possible that my favourable experience owes something to this observation. But I think the outstandingly good practice I encountered ran much deeper. As did the inefficiencies.

. . The problem, as I saw it, is a lack of the NHS equivalent of hands-on supermarket floor managers, factory fore- men and Army sergeant majors: the cogs who make the machine work.

. . In numerous, passionate debates about the future of the NHS I have never heard mention of porter shortages, pharmacy management, hospital transport or trolley logistics. But unless the inefficiencies are sorted the cuts will reverse the NHS improvements of the past decade.

. . Protests, barricades, petitions. In the battle for resources, valued local community hospitals and less glamorous bits of the NHS are trampled underfoot. But it needn't be like that. Sensible steps have to be taken now to ensure the high-quality people who work in the NHS are properly used.'

Related Link:

• Vince Cable: My lost appendix - and what it taught me about the NHS [Daily Mail, Jun 13]