Shropshire Star comment: Is scrapping NHS targets the right prescription?

Before people throw up their hands in horror, remember that there was a time that public institutions, whether they be schools with their performance league tables, or hospitals and their waiting lists, did not operate in an atmosphere in which how they were doing statistically was made public, and could be compared with other schools and hospitals.

And there is an argument that if you introduce any system which makes hitting targets paramount, then all efforts are skewed to meeting those targets by hook or by crook, and you end up in the old Soviet era syndrome where washing machine plants, say, met production targets by making machines, taking them apart, and then making them again.

Mr Hancock’s suggestion that the Government could abandon the four-hour accident and emergency waiting time target comes against a background of the worst performance on record in England under this benchmark. The target for seeing people within four hours is 95 per cent. The reality is that 81 per cent were seen within that time in November.

His argument is that the waiting times target is no longer an appropriate measure for determining how hospitals are actually doing in treating people. You get similar arguments about school performance tables, that exam results do not tell the full story and are apt to mislead.

Then there is the pressure that these benchmarks impose. So fearful are staff of faring badly, that they are in danger of serving the statistics rather than patients.

There is a flip side too in which hospitals may be appearing to do well when you look at the figures, but anecdotally – and anecdotes of real-life care do not appear in statistical tables – there are patients and loved ones who have had less happy experiences.

Scrapping the targets would take away the political heat on the Government for failing to meet them.

But then how would hospitals know by how much they needed to improve?

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When small electronic calculators began to become widely available in the early 1970s, maths teachers were appalled by the implications.

Instead of having to know how to do long division, pupils could punch in the numbers and, hey presto, get the answer.

If they did not have access to a calculator, being stuck on a desert island or something like that, they would be incapable of solving the mathematical problems involved in designing their getaway raft.

Now Wolverhampton Grammar School has stirred up debate by declaring that exercise books are “old fashioned.” Pupils aged nine to 14 use iPads rather than exercise books and textbooks.

The school is preparing students for the future, not the past, the head says.

Opting in wholesale to a brave new digital world is itself a brave decision. How many offices going “paperless” actually do away with the printer?

Handwriting is future-proof, never obsolete. Writings on parchment from hundreds of years ago can be read and understood.

Digital creations last as long as somebody doesn’t press Delete.