Lord Darzi of HarlesdenThis quote is from Lord Darzi before he started his consultation on the future of NHS provision.
It is quite clear that Nulabour has wanted to close down the network of district general hospitals for many years. District general hospitals provide the bulk of NHS secondary care and employ large numbers of staff. Staff are employed under rigid T&C of service and this leaves little scope for reducing costs within the NHS even with the ready availability of vast numbers of people from Eastern Europe and beyond who would be willing to work for a fraction of current NHS wages. If the service could be provided in a parallel system run by the private sector, issues such as staff wages, qualifications and training could be conveniently circumvented.
Nulabour initially tried a direct approach in Kidderminster and were shocked to lose a safe seat to Dr Richard Taylor who campaigned on keeping the hospital open. Since then more devious methods have been employed including the Darzi review with its sham consultations and predetermined outcome.
Dr Phil Hammond, the clap doctor, medical journalist and TV personality has written on this on a doctors' only medical site called Univadis. His column is like a blog but he gets paid to write it. I don't, so I don't feel too bad about copying it in full because he makes the points I want to make rather well:
"Should we have one union that represents all NHS workers? This thought struck me at a UNISON meeting I was asked to speak at m in Cambridge. The East of England SHA was £800 million in debt when it came into existence and has never quite recovered. Two district general hospitals in Hertfordshire are in the process of being ‘downsized', despite the fact that they are treating more patients than ever, to be replaced by ‘acute care centres' to be run by GPs, allegedly. Management claims that many A&E attendances are inappropriate, but 90% of acute admissions to both hospitals come via A&E. These are hardly inappropriate and if you close the front door of any hospital, what's left is very vulnerable. Job losses have started but any protest by UNISON to the SHA is answered with ‘clinicians want this.'
This is the latest Labour wheeze, to claim that the reform programme is based around what clinicians want. Lord Darzi, a very eminent clinician, is leading the charge, and doubtless in a workforce as diverse as the NHS it's possible to rustle up some pro-Labour doctors to rubber stamp reconfiguration. But the last twenty years of clinical medicine has been about abandoning the dubious opinions of experts and focusing on the best available evidence. The same approach should be applied to NHS reforms.
The best evidence so far on NHS reconfiguration comes from a comprehensive analysis by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. Hardly the most radical organisation, but their message was simple. There is a case for the centralisation of specialist services onto fewer sites, but only in three areas; major trauma, neurosurgery and vascular surgery. However, there is no evidence – in terms of quality and safety - to support the centralisation of the non-complex and high volume work that is the bread and butter of district general hospitals. If you've got any sort of breathing difficulty (asthma, choking, anaphylaxis), you want to get to a local A&E, and quickly.
This report was conveniently buried under all that mock election hubris, superseded by Lord Darzi's interim review which contained such gems as ‘we need to change the way we lead change.' Have you ever met a surgeon who speaks like that? What has ‘new' Labour done to the poor man? His report was largely a smokescreen for the real story, that Labour has ‘approved' 14 private forms to help PCTs with commissioning (McKinsey, UnitedHealth, KPMG, Dr Foster Intelligence (sic) etc). Given that PCT commissioning is worth £64 billion, this is clearly something that a united NHS workforce should challenge. But we're not united, and we still work in silos with ridiculous inter-professional rivalries. And without one union representing us all, from doctors to domestics, we're quietly sleepwalking towards a privatised NHS. I don't think clinicians do want this, but we're too supine to complain. Wakey, wakey. As Joni Mitchell put it; ‘We won't know what we've got till it's gone.' "
Lord Darzi was appointed as Health Minister so that Nulabour can argue that it has listened to the clinicians when they give health care to the private companies to run. If the experiment works they will take the credit; if it doesn't and the population realise they have been hoodwinked when they lose their local services they will blame us.
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More plagiarism: a joke sent to me from South Africa
The phone rings and the lady of the house answers.
"Hello. Mrs. Ward, please."
"Speaking."
"Mrs. Ward, this is Doctor Jones at the Medical Testing Laboratory.
When your doctor sent your husband's biopsy to the lab yesterday,
a biopsy from another Mr. Ward arrived as well, and we are now uncertain
which one is your husband's.
Frankly the results are either bad or terrible."
"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Ward nervously.
"Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer's,
and the other one tested positive for AIDS. We can't tell which is your
husband's."
"That's dreadful! Can't you do the test again?" asked Mrs. Ward.
Normally we can, but Medicare will only pay for these expensive tests
one time."
"Well, what am I supposed to do now?" asked Mrs. Ward.
"The people at Medicare recommend that you drop your husband off
somewhere in the middle of town.
If he finds his way home, don't sleep with him."
3 comments:
great post, Phil Hammond's piece is also very to the point, the mainstream media should be picking up on this
2 observations
1)
if healthcare is perceived as free by the populace - as it is - then demand will tend towrds infinity. necessarily supply is limited so there *has* to be rationing. we used to do that by the device known as waiting lists. we can't have those now, so we covertly limit supply by a variety of duplicitous tricks including closing DGHs and limiting cash for the frontline.
2)
private companies are *in it for the money*. this is not inherently evil, it's just business. however, if you are in it for the money you will certainly limit availabiltiy of the service that makes you money - namely healthcare - and maximize revenue buy squeezing costs. i am stunned that anyone (other than a politician with his/her nose in the pork barrel) can really believe that this way lies better 'value for money' in terms of health tax spend
ps: i had that Ara Darzi in the back of my operating theatre once - he was a nice guy as an SR (if anyone remembers those!)
Hallo Anonymous,
I think we probably know each other because I knew Ara as an SR too.
I don't think the closure of the DGHs is being planned so much to restrict access but to allow the work to be done by less regulated and lower paid staff. This would have the same effect on healthcare as in other labour intensive industries such as catering and construction. This can't be done within the NHS because of the safeguards that have evolved but could be done by private operators if the licensing bodies such as the GMC allow it, which they seem happy to do.
Once health care is provided by private companies the notion of "free at the point of use" will erode as it has with dentistry and education. The companies will gradually seek payments for enhanced services such as reduced waits, better facilities and qualified doctors while the basic NHS service will gradually become a safety net for the very poor
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