OK I am now going to link Charles Moore and Ali Parsa in a thread. This is very easy to do because they are egotists that get more media attention than they deserve

First Moore. A week ago he wrote a clickbait piece for the Telegraph about the "inflexibility of our lumbering NHS" completely fact free, of course.

Wednesday I had a video governance meeting for local trust. One of the Trust directors was calling from the local private hospital where she now has an office. The Trust has completely taken over that hospital and two others. Elective operations are being done there

the Trust's hospital is for emergencies, covid and non-covid. In a couple of weeks the hospital has been completely reconfigured so that there are two streams via the "front door" of A&E - and these are kept separate, in A&E and throughout the hospital.

The trust opened a new operating theatre at the beginning of the year, and this means they have converted another to be additional intensive care.

The trust has three community hospitals, one is now the ophthalmology and cancer departments, the others are being reconfig'd

The trust recognises that during the covid crisis there will still be non-covid emergencies. They recognise that some treatments MUST continue or else people will get worse and become emergencies.

The local system has been reconfig'd too with other trusts concentrating on specific clinics for the entire area. The idea is to isolate clinics from covid areas. Yes patients have to travel further, but they will still get the treatments they need.

Inflexible? FFS has Moore spoken to ANYONE AT ALL in the NHS? To get all of this done in a matter of weeks is incredible.

Now Parsa. Whining, whinging egotist that thinks the state owes him a living. He is the ultimate in welfare benefit sponger. Parsa wants the govt to bail out Babylon even though he has $0.5bn of Saudi money and he has NHS GP capitation money

Babylon, if you remember, is trying to replace primary care with an app that he has made ludicrous and erroneous efficacy claims. Its software, so its flexible, right? Well, it turns out that it isn't, or else why would it need a bailout?

Meanwhile, "traditional" GP practices, like hospitals, have transformed themselves. All practices have moved from face-to-face to phone or internet triage. IN A WEEK. Is that inflexibility?

They have had to change to the new referral system, hospitals now do a very restricted range of clinics and diagnostics so it is much harder for GPs to decide who must go to them. Yet primary care has changed very quickly and mitigated.

And Babylon? It's stuck in the same business model. It will take months for it to be re-written and tested to work with the "new world" and by then there will be another "new world" since we won't go back to what it was before.

Software can be flexible, but that needs vision and cash, and usually decisions are taken to go the cheapest route. A GP is not "cheap" (each one costs hundreds of thousands £ in training) but they are flexible, and covid shows why we need that flexibility.

(Aside: can we please celebrate that GPs are generalists? Please, don't make them GP "specialists". That is not how they give value. They are invaluable BECAUSE they are generalists.)

So Parsa and Moore are just peas in a pod. They are self-promoting egotists. And I hope that when this is all over the media will recognise that they should no longer get attention. /end