#unit 51

To start with I didn’t fully understand this unit, and for a week I spent most of my time panicking about what to do and why I didn’t understand it. But then I realised that each piece of work on the checklist complemented the next piece of work. Before I knew it, I’d completed all the research tasks and had a fantastic foundation to complete my final magazine layout. The final product took no time at all because I had a physical plan for the layout, research under my belt for graphic design elements, research into the issue I was writing the article about, and knowledge of how to create it.

The unit has taught me an awful lot about how important research is to the finished product of anything in media production, or anything creative full stop. When trying to tackle the second task head on with no research I was completely baffled, but after undertaking clear and effective planning and research the work practically did itself.

I’m happy with the poster, and the final double page spread - but not as happy as I could be with the latter. I feel like the gutters are a little uneven and as the text goes on it starts to look a bit dodgy when it wraps around the pull quote in the center. I’d like to learn how to fix that properly, as I couldn’t figure it out and had to do a kind of makeshift wraparound text. 

Now I’ve designed the layout and have the image selected and everything in front of me I’m going to plan the text. I want to have three subheadings separating the article into three main parts. These being the current state of the NHS, how the Tory party have got us there, and how Labour can fix it. This gives me room to present statistics for Labour, and against the Tory party, while using the research and statistics I’ve gathered as a factual look at why the NHS is going down the pan.

I’ve done this because as I’ve explained before, the article is meant to be a bit of a shocker. It’s sensationalist journalism with cherry picked statistics with a left leaning bias, but it’s still fact and therefore entirely legal and within the realistic bounds of journalism. Even just the term ‘Corbynite’ makes “politically savvy” teens believe they’re part of something and hop on the bandwagon. 

The first subheading will lay the problem out and have the reader thinking, “the NHS is a wreck! This is awful! Panic!”, the immediate reaction after this is looking for someone to blame. This is where the second subheading comes in: blame Cameron. Finally, with the reader sufficiently frustrated and on board with the author (me), the third subheading comes in which will paint Corbynite Labour as a saviour of the NHS and the only right answer to the problem. Obviously, this isn’t true. It is, however, fit for the purpose I intended.

INTRO

With everybody focused on the EU referendum in the current political climate, there seems to be a lack of focus on one crucial part of Britain in the argument: the NHS. The NHS which has served us for so long, upheld by the hardworking staff which work tirelessly to provide our healthcare to us is being sold off behind the scenes by Cameron and his elite band of Eton buddies. So what’s actually going on?

THE NHS’ SLOW DEMISE AND WHY

When the NHS was originally started, every part of it was funded by a healthy budget made up of a fair sum of taxpayers’ money and the sector thrived. The waiting times were reasonable, the treatments were effective and quick, and the general public were more than satisfied. In the last five or six years that attitude has changed to a bitter one, for both the public and the media. The NHS is on a downward spiral, because it is no longer as simple as it once was.

The crux of this issue comes with funding. The budget for the NHS has seen a decreased, with the Treasury haven taken sums as much as £2bn in unspent budget in the years 2012 and 2013. This kind of money is crucial to the NHS’ budget, and is leading to it struggling. So why is this kind of money disappearing? Is it to repay loans to corporate loan sharks?

The ‘corporate loan sharks’ spoken of are the contractors of private finance initiatives that are essentially loans with sky high interest rates. How high? Coventry University Hospital cost £400 million to build in its entirety, a reasonable sum for a large hospital. The money to pay for this came from one of these PFI loans. The repayment scheme on this loan is £3 billion pounds. That’s nearly eight times the amount it actually cost to build the hospital.

It is because of this method of building hospitals and repayments that the word ‘privatisation’ is being thrown around a lot. Our public health sector is being funded by private loans from contractors.

Can the taxpayer really afford this burden, and to become customers rather than patients in a public health sector that’s being turned into a business?

THE TORY EFFECT

All of this going on, first under a coalition government who promised the exact opposite, and then again under a whole Tory government who promised even more that they’d acknowledged their mistakes and were going to fix everything! A big part of Cameron’s election strategy was to play on the emotions of those who had received NHS care by creating a relatable character of himself, due to the care that his own son had once needed that the NHS provided.

It would shock, then, to see the same man whose son needed NHS care neglect that very same system and irresponsibly put it in harm’s way - by extension putting other people in harm’s way. Are we heading towards an Americanised healthcare system, where infant deaths number as high as 6.1 deaths for every 10,000 live births?

It’s fair to say that the public generally perceive Cameron as a clueless, privileged, out-of-his-depth rich kid during his election campaign - with countless images of Cameron mid-breathe looking ridiculous constantly circulating the media, “Dodgy Dave” found himself at the butt of every joke.

In order to combat this image, Cameron did indeed create a relatable character of himself, trying to let the general public know that “look! I’m just like you!”. The thick of this came during a pre-election speech that saw him make a bold statement, promising to “stop the top-down reorganisations and pointless structural upheavals that have done so much damage in the NHS”.

What a hero. Except, after his election, Cameron also said that all he really wanted to know was “how to drive the NHS to be a fantastic business”. 

Dodgy Dave indeed.

CORBYNITE LABOUR

When talking about contracts, and private finance initiatives, and an overgrown child in a blue tie living in Number 10, it’s easy to get flustered and think there’s no way out. But, there is.

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has laid out well costed plans to start putting the gears in motion that will fix the NHS, even recognising that the NHS’ burden could be relieved by propping up the services surrounding it such as mental health and social care. By targeting all of these issues a little bit at a time, the NHS’ strain will slowly disappear.

As we were originally tasked with creating a poster advertising our issue and I’m happy with the one I did, as it displays a firm understanding of design elements and the importance of colour, imagery, and placement, I’ve blown this image up to A3 size (and retained nearly all of the quality while doing so) because it’s the best possible poster to advertise my issue and aligns with the party I’ve provided research for.

Final Layout Plan (Considering Magazine Layout Anatomy)

This is my plan for my magazine layout. In the sketch I’ve covered most of the magazine layout anatomy that I mentioned in previous posts. Putting this idea down on paper and noting down gutter sizes, colour schemes, and column numbers has been a massive help because now I know roughly where I want everything when I do my final article in InDesign, and I won’t be coming up with anything on the spot.

I’m now prepared with research, statistics, layout rules of thumb and anatomy, and a design idea that I’m happy with and will begin my drafting my article.

To research the topic further and gather statistics, I watched the hour-long documentary “Sell-Off”, a film about the NHS’ slow but sure road towards privatisation. I’ll be jotting notes here to use for my article from the documentary and the three articles that I linked as sources in my previous research post.

From the documentary it’s clear that our public sector is heading towards a more Americanised style of finance, here are statistics to show why that’s a bad idea: the US spends $8,233 per person, per year on healthcare (17.7% GDP). At the end of 2014, the UK spent only $3,433 per person, per year on healthcare (9.4% GDP). Despite this, the UK’s life expectancy is 1.9 years more than the US’ life expectancy.

Another alarming statistic to prove that an Americanised healthcare system is only going to be bad for us is to compare a country such as Slovenia (a comparably poor, Eastern European country) to America in infant deaths. The Slovenians spend $2,429 per person, per year and their infant mortality rate is 2.49 (per every 10,000 live births). The Americans spend nearly three times this, and their infant deaths are at 6.1 (per every 10,000 live births).

A large reason this cloak and dagger style of privatisation is going on is due to Private Finance Initiative, or PFI, which is a loan sharking style of loan repayments used by investors in the NHS to build more hospitals at extortionate repayment rates. For example, Coventry University Hospital cost £400 million to build and has a repayment scheme of £3 billion. This is completely unethical and blatant usury, especially as the PFI contracts are open to indexation - this means that the cost of repayment can rise with inflation.

Where cuts are being brought in to ease the load of these repayment schemes, A&Es across the country are being closed down, and the ones left open are over burdened because of this. This means that ambulances have to drive further when carrying someone in an emergency to an A&E further away from the incident, and this causes deaths. People aren’t getting the treatment they need as soon as they need it. This is no exaggeration, for example, when Newark A&E closed, the death rates of local A&E patients doubled. 

All of this is happening in the face of an elected leader who promised the exact opposite of this would happen, when in fact Cameron and the good old boys are capitalising on this even despite the fact that Cameron’s own son has, multiple times, needed the care of the NHS. In 2010, pre-election, Cameron promised that the Conservatives would “stop the top-down reorganisations and pointless structural upheavals that have done so much damage in the NHS”. This clearly satisfied people enough, but wrongly so. As after his election, Cameron was quoted as saying “what I want to know is how to drive the NHS to be a fantastic business”.

As well as this, there are reasons to believe that the Tory government is purposefully putting the NHS budget on the back burner and leaving it to rot, with acts of commissioning (allowing private companies to tap into the NHS budget) and taking back unspent money from the NHS budget (which could have been spent later on in far more productive ways: where did it bloody go?) making people question the Tory’s true intentions. In 2012, the Treasury took £2 billion of the unspent NHS budget, and again took £2 billion in 2013. All of this, when hospitals are still closing because of a lack of far smaller funds.