We have a passing interest in Andrew Lansley on this blog: the combination of arrogance, ignorance and power that Lansley represents can only be a winning one that leads to fun and frolics worth keeping an eye on. See already his nonsense about patient readmissions and local decision making.
Here are two more examples to add to the list.
1. An Accident & Emergency unit in Newark has been closed. This follows Lansley’s opportunistic moratorium on the closure of such units before the election, which was politics through and through.
2. Lansley has attacked Jamie Oliver’s popular attempt to support healthy eating in schools. He suggested (in a quote I suspect will come back to haunt him):
If we are constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do, we will actually find that we undermine and are counterproductive in the results that we achieve.
Of course, Lansley’s perverse attack is made worse by the fact the coalition government has removed half a million families from free school meal programmes.
Keep up the good work, Andrew!
I think on Point 1 the jury is still in the corridor: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/13/abdominal-aortic-aneurysm-surgery-statistics provided quite a shock to the system; demonstrating evidence that closures might well be justified for certain conditions at certain levels of scale.
Cheers Paul. It’s not that I don’t think there are some A&E departments which should close (given right circumstances etc.) – it’s just the blatant and irresponsible politicking that Lansley engages in, especially when he knows he can’t and shouldn’t promise such things.