Abstract
Breaking News: KOREA, 31 October. Rumours escalate that the UK Health Minister, Jeremy Hunt, has been invited by North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to join a North Korean think-tank on ‘how to deliver policy’. An uninformed source with contacts who have travelled near to North Korea told our editorial team that Kim “was impressed with the manner in which Jeremy Hunt (known affectionately to the North Koreans as ‘Jem King-kong’) had dealt with key UK healthcare staff and had created an alternative reality which ignored most facts and workforce sensitivities in order to facilitate a political agenda. He (Kim Jong-un) felt there was a lot the North Korean politicians could learn from Jem King-kong’s political management style”.
The think-tank is scheduled to convene in January 2016: Robert Mugabe, Alex Salmond and Donald Trump have also been invited to join.
Editorial note: The editorial team was unable to contact Mr Hunt's office to corroborate the story as none of his staff work at weekends.
LONDON, 31 October. An uninformed source has advised Lemmingaid that the latest batch of UK healthcare policies were generated during a drug-fuelled party attended by senior politicians, a member of the House of Lords, the managing director of a private medical insurance company, and a number of aspiring ‘interns’ with an interest in governmental policy-making. Our source claims to have attended the party during which invited and paid guests were encouraged to ingest the truth drug timoxeline barbebutenol prior to participating in an adult game. An intern dressed as a secretary was encouraged to take minutes, a copy of which subsequently fell into the possession of health policy decision-makers who felt that it represented “a robust, visionary and exciting new solution for UK healthcare that was imminently implementable, providing key stakeholders in healthcare weren't consulted”.
The Lemmingaid team attempted to contact the Department of Health with regards the story, but were unable to do so as none of the staff work at weekends.
Wood is in a rage; he flies into the office looking plethoric and hypertensive; he has just endured a three hour interrogation by the Care Quality Commission Intensive Care Unit Inspector (CQCICUI). Wood is suspicious that at the time of his own consultant appointment CQCICUI was still a neural tube; nevertheless, he had been informed in advance that CQCICUI has immeasurable power to cause trouble for the Trust, and he was therefore to be on best behaviour. Wood had pointed out that he reserved his best behaviour for private patients.
The interrogation had focused largely on the guidelines present on the intensive care unit (ICU); or rather the lack of a guideline for the ‘weaning of mechanically ventilated patients with neuromuscular disorders resulting from heavy metal poisoning with co-existing neurocysticercosis’. It seems that CQCICUI’s own unit adopted the latter guideline from a pig-farming doctor who supplies his products to a Russian polonium factory.
Trees is bemused. He points out that CQCICUI’s own ICU doesn’t have any other guidelines and was itself graded by the CQC as ‘inadequate’, following which the Trust instructed all key staff to become CQC inspectors in order to “learn how to play the game” and “bring down the competition”.
At a recent meeting attended by both Wood and Trees, a CQC inspector had informed all present that a “CQC inspection merely involves the inspection team undertaking a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ review of the day-to-day workings of the hospital”. Wood had commented that his own Trust’s preparations for this ‘fly-on-the-wall’ visit had started more than six months prior to the inspectorate arriving. Twice daily recitals of the CQC core values had become mandatory, and proscriptive responses to all possible CQC questions had been distributed to all loyal staff who were subsequently volunteered to undertake ‘day-to-day’ activities within the Trust during the CQC's inspection. Testing of ‘Q&As’ had ensued over the following months with a salary-dependent mandatory pass mark of 98% compliance with the ‘recommended responses’. Those falling below this pass mark and those disloyal to the Trust (e.g. those with a history of raising concerns over patient safety) were allocated to distant-off-site mandatory training days for the period of the CQC inspection.
Trees has his own problems, however; he has been tasked with appointing a new ‘clinical fellow’ due to the diminishing number of trainees allowed to benefit from the worldly experience on offer in his unit. In a moment of unusual gusto, he had accepted the task forgetting that the process would require engagement with both the hospital’s Human Resources (HR) department and NHS Jobs, the latter being a torturous process for generating web-induced suicide ideation which was rejected by the International Association of Water-Boarders as being unethical. After two hours of fighting with the website, he tries to contact the HR department but is unable to do so as they don’t work weekends. He decides that it will be more satisfying to see what employment opportunities are on offer for an ageing and cynical (read ‘mature and managerially experienced’) consultant intensivist. After an hour browsing the job descriptions of posts available from Thurso to Saudi, he comes across an advert that immediately sparks his interest: Are you a motivated and energetic individual who is eager to achieve high earnings and is comfortable with aggressively seeking profit-making opportunities in other people's misery? If so, Wealth Management Healthcare Solutions (WMHS) would like to meet you. For further information, please contact the Executive Director of WMHS … “To the Executive Director of WMHS Dear Mr Jem King-kong …”