It serves no purpose except to rubber stamp already formulated policy, and gives an entirely spurious and false credibility to a process of NHS privatisation that they either support or don't understand.
I'm sorry to be so scathing about some people who have done much good work in the past, but they are rapidly turning into what Lenin apparently described as "Useful Idiots" - people whose earnestness and naivete result in outcomes that they did not intend.
We are in the process of seeing the National Health Service disbanded before our eyes. If the breast implant scenario teaches us anything, it is that the private sector generally plucks the low-hanging fruit, and even then can make a mess of it.
Members of the Future Forum need to take a long hard look in the mirror, and ask themselves what they are doing, and why so many people are deeply worried about the current plans. Why can they not think about what they are achieving?
I would urge them to read this article by Aseem Malhotra, a Junior Hospital Doctor, and reflect on the morality of what they are doing. I hope Dr Malhotra does not mind my cutting and pasting his short and eloquent piece. It is worth it.
A few weeks ago I attended a meeting in the House of Commons organised by the shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham. The purpose of the gathering, attended by around 40 leaders and representatives of all the major health organisations, was to determine views and gather support for a proposed "plan B" for the health service and to oppose the health and social care bill. Towards the end, a GP asked the learned ensemble: "Please raise your hands if any one of you does not have serious and grave concerns about the health and social care bill." Not a single hand went up.
I have been a qualfied doctor for more than 10 years. I am extremely proud to occupy a position of being able to treat my patients according to clinical need, not ability to pay. That is the underlying ethos of the overwhelming majority of doctors in this country. It is why I spent years slogging in medical school, inspired by being able to practise in a health system representing social justice.
This is the foundation behind the NHS. An NHS that still holds an 80% satisfaction rate among all who have been treated by it.
It is the characteristics of honesty, reliability, beneficence, personal responsibility, integrity and independence that make up the moral character of health practitioners. But also what makes doctors competent has to be supplemented by what makes them caring: it is not just a matter of providing items of service against a contract, a costed menu. This is also why doctors still command the highest trust rating of any profession among the British public: 92%.
But these attributes that have laid the foundations for a health service will be irreversibly threatened if we allow Andrew Lansley's health and social care bill to go through. This monstrous bill is designed to privatise the NHS at every level: primary and secondary care, in community health services, and in commissioning - all of it deceptively concealed by the trusted NHS logo. The reforms will increase the stake of private companies in the NHS, so that instead of GP-led primary care and consultant-delivered hospital services we will witness "any willing providers" picking up the most lucrative operations, with the NHS left to provide complex, costly care. There should be absolutely no illusion that we are being led towards an Americanised system of healthcare.
The reforms will also produce a different breed of doctor, with many going in to medicine with a different mindset. We are in danger of producing doctors who go into the profession not out of a sense of public service duty and vocation; they will go in because it will be seen as another career option. The doctor-patient relationship, built on trust, will be eroded from the social contract and the rights of the patient to the "sales contract" and the rights of the "consumer".
So this is where Lansley and the Conservatives are trying to lead us despite the overwhelming majority of doctors, nurses and the public being against this bill. What they are doing to the health service is totally undemocratic. Any spin they publicise to the contrary is at best misleading and at worst downright deception.
But there is still time to save the NHS. Lansley has tried to pacify opponents of the bill by making some concessions after liaising with the individual heads of the various medical faculties, but they fall far short of what is needed.
In my opinion there is only one solution. All doctors leaders must unite with one voice calling for the bill to be dropped, and there is hope. The next few weeks will potentially prove to be the most historic moments in the history of the NHS. Andy Burnham is holding a second meeting with health leaders to galvanise support to ask the government for the bill to be dropped. A goverment e-petition to "drop the bill" set up by GP Dr Kailash Chand, has already gained more than 27,000 signatures, while the 38 Degrees "Save the NHS" petition has been signed by nearly half a million people. David Cameron made a pre-election promise that there "would be no top down reorganisation of the NHS".
It is time to expose what is really behind this bill. Let us therefore expose the catastrophic consequences these reforms will have on the health of our nation.
Doctors' leaders have one last chance to do what they know is best for their patients.
Let us not look back in years from now and have the realisation that we could and should have done more.
Dr Aseem Malhotra is a cardiology specialist registrar
I hope that Professor Field and his friends will find time to read it.
4 comments:
NHS privatisation is a long term project that started in 1979 with the Thatcher government. It then continued with Major, Blair and Brown. Andy Burnham and the rest of the labour government could have reversed it, but they didn't. Everything that the coalition are doing now is based entirely on what went on before. Labour are utter hypocrites to oppose it now.
Even if what Yoav states is true personally I'd rather people were able to see that they were going down a wrong path and changed their minds than be supine simply because previously they had gone a different way. It's not hypocritical to change your mind if you follow through with the change.
"An NHS that still holds an 80% satisfaction rate among all who have been treated by it."
If I was running a company, I certainly would not be happy if only 80% of my customers were satisfied.
In any case, the problem is usually getting treated by the NHS in a reasonable time scale, and once we have been treated most of us are satisfied. My brother-in-law was diagnosed with suspected bowel cancer a week before Christmas. No appointment could be made for further tests until 4th January because the hospital had no clue when staff would be available to investigate further. Regardless of the outcome of the treatment, if any, one can hardly regard that wait as satisfactory. As I never get tired of pointing out, I worked in the aviation business, a 24/7 365 days a year business where we took time off according to the needs of the business. It is not an essential business, people aren't going to die if they can't fly on Christmas Eve, yet the NHS, which I assume is still considered an essential service, virtually closes down at nights, weekends and bank holidays.
The private sector would probably do better because there would be an outcry if they carried on like the NHS, but no outcry will in anyway affect the entrenched attitudes of the NHS.
Private medicine certainly doesn't work 24/7 in the UK. The out-of-hours cover, as I understand it, is usually one very junior 'locum' doctor per private hospital.
It seems obvious to me, as the other half of a former hospital doctor, that the NHS night and w/end staffing levels in hospitals have dropped because it is a way to cut costs. There are certainly staff prepared to work the hours, often out of an old-school sense of obligation, but traditionally they earned overtime or out-of-hours rates for doing it. Which, whatever else you can say, is one way of 'signing' to the employees that their sacrifice in working on Christmas Day is recognised and appreciated.
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