The NHS is in crisis? No it's not it is building healthy towns. Is it 1st April?

The headline in a couple of the UK newspapers state that the provider of public healthcare (the NHS) has plans to create ten ‘healthy new towns’ across the country, covering more than 76,000 new homes with potential capacity for approximately 170,000 residents.

Quoting from the press release - the ideas is to test creative solutions for the health and care challenges of the 21st century, including obesity, dementia and community cohesion, bringing together renowned clinicians, designers and technology experts to reimagine how healthcare can be delivered in these places, to showcase what’s possible by joining up design of the built environment with modern health and care services, and to deploy new models of technology-enabled primary care.

This is the same NHS that chronically short of money, nurses, doctors and just about everything else. The word 'crisis' and NHS are normally associated in the same sentence.

The idea that the NHS is capable of organising, or even being involved, in such an illustrious project is make-belief. It is abject nonsense. 

The gap between the 'noise' that churns out of PR departments of government and government related organisations and day-to-day reality has never been so wide. Healthcare, from primary care, acute hospitals through to care homes and care in the community is in a mess. Yet the feel-good PR releases keep coming. 

Marketers live in a world that is deluged with this noise and inevitably they must think it might be true. It is only when confronted with reality, like their parents or grandparents being ill, that they see what is happening. 

The provision of healthcare and general care to older people is an awful state and that isn't going to change. There are opportunities for companies to provide services that have historically come from the state. So that is a big upside, but you have to fight through the bul***t to see what is really happening. Dick Stroud