Next time someone tells you that Labour and the Conservatives are identical

[andrewducker]

Notice the trend up throughout the 90s as things got worse and worse, and then the trend down shortly after Labour took office?

They may have done a lot of things wrong, but the NHS is a lot better off than it was.

From

Comments

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

The main questions I would ask about this graph are:

1. What went so wrong in 1996?


2. What started to go right in 2003?

The Tories' record looks particularly awful because of a huge rise from 1996 to 1998. This period also makes Labour's record look much better. Without it, we have pretty much a steady state from 1994 to 2003. It would be very interesting to know the reason for this huge anomaly.

But there is a definite downward trend in the period from 2003 to the present. It would be interesting to know what changed in 2002-3 to make this happen.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

To play devils davocate: the number of people in the longest-wait categories went down fairly steadily throughout the Conservative era. It looks like the trend over 87-97 was people moving from long waiting lists to short ones.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

For the reasons you have already described, plus a wide and enthusiastic variety of others, these statistics are basically meaningless. There are now more ways of massaging the numbers than ever, including interesting things like queueing systems to even be allowed to be put on a waiting list. Rather than a waiting list waiting lists.

And that is somewhat meaningless because it's an invented number with no real value.

I'd guess the primary reason the numbers have come down is that Labour have concentrated the central administrative policy on getting the numbers down. So the administrators find ways to do that. And the table looks better. Whether patient care has improved in the slightest as a result is virtually impossible to discern, because actual medicine doesn't really care what your graph says. More diseases are found or invented damned near daily, more cures and treatments for those diseases are found just as frequently, and everybody dies.

oh, and the lovely policy of discharging patients at the earliest possible opportunity is probably helping a fair bit as well. As a Social Care Worker it certainly kept me busy.

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

I have to take issue with your reasoning - apart from all the questions about massaging of statistics and comparing apples with oranges, the fact is that much of the money that was used to get where we are was borrowed and will need to be payed back with interest.