Monthly Archives: November 2011

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Changes in guidelines for Caesarean sections is in the news. The Independent suggests that the shortage of midwives is “linked to rise in Caesarean births”.

The BMA warns new government proposals could give the private sector an advantage in the commissioning support process.

http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/targets

The banks have run the global economy into the ground. Bankers, encouraged by the government, gambled recklessly with our money, and they lost. Spectacularly. Remember 2008? In the UK, the government decided it had to step in with a bail-out because these banks were ‘too big to fail’. According to the Bank of England, the cost of this bail-out now exceeds £1trillion. The result is that all high street banks- from Barclays to RBS- owe their existence to public financing.

What did we get for our billions? A banking system that serves ordinary people rather than the super-rich? No. Regretful bankers who refuse to reward themselves with massive bonuses? No. How about increased financial regulation to ensure this crisis couldn’t happen again? No. The government has done nothing to stop it being business as usual for banks.

What’s worse, the money that was given to the bankers is the money now being taken from the poorest in society, guaranteeing a rise in poverty, debt and inequality. Nearly £7 billion will be paid out in bank bonuses this year. This sum is more than the first wave of public spending cuts. We are not all in this together because it’s us who will pay if education, health, housing, libraries, woodland and much, much more, disappears from our lives.

Who’s telling us we must make these cuts? A government led by a cabinet of millionaires, in bed with the bankers, which is now pulling off an audacious con-trick in front of our eyes.

This is how their story goes. The crisis was caused by a bloated public sector. We binged away all our money on luxuries like healthcare and free education and council services, care for the elderly, for people with disabilities, school sports and free school meals for children living in poverty. Now the country is bankrupt and we must repent, detox, cut back. We have to relinquish our welfare state to appease the circling money men. Welcome to the Age of Austerity but don’t worry because we are all in this together.

We say – don’t believe their lies. This is their crisis, but there is no austerity for the bankers.


Conservative election poster 2010

A few recent news articles about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

NHS caesarean guidelines aim to push down demand for procedure | Society | The Guardian

No woman who wants a caesarean should be refused one, but if women have the risks of surgery explained to them, the numbers should fall, according to fresh NHS guidance on childbirth.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has tried to deny speculation in the media that the new guidelines meant women would be entitled to a caesarean on demand, but the implication remains that nobody should be turned down.

Nice said most women would choose a vaginal delivery if they received proper information, and its guidelines committee said they did not recognise the concept of women choosing a caesarean because they were “too posh to push”.

Most women who asked for a caesarean had either physical or mental health issues that made them unable or unwilling to try ordinary delivery, they said.
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Midwife shortage linked to rise in Caesarean births – Health News – Health & Families – The Independent

Warning comes as health body revises guidelines to allow women to demand surgical delivery

Caesarean birth rates may rise from their present record levels unless urgent action is taken to address the “massive” midwife shortage, childbirth experts have warned.

The warning came as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) updated its guidance to enable women to demand a Caesarean section, even when it was not medically necessary and despite its higher cost to the NHS.

The move is intended to help medical staff to intervene earlier with women who may be worried about natural childbirth. Evidence shows most can be reassured about the safety of a vaginal delivery. But if, after discussion of the risks and benefits, a woman still wants a Caesarean, they should be able to have one, the guidance says.

The previous guide, in 2004, said “maternal request is not on its own an indication for Caesarean section” and could be declined by a doctor.

Experts launching the guidance yesterday said they expected demand for Caesareans to fall as a result of earlier intervention and new advice that those who have had two or more Caesareans, and those with HIV, may safely opt for a vaginal birth.

However, a report from the Royal College of Midwives yesterday said the maternity services faced a “looming crisis” as a result of a 22 per cent rise in the birth rate since 2001 and a shortfall of almost 5,000 midwives in England. Lack of midwife support during birth was an important reason for high Caesarean rates, Malcolm Griffiths, consultant obstetrician at Luton and Dunstable Hospital and chairman of the Nice guideline group, said.
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Government proposals ‘prioritise private companies’ – News – Practice Business

The BMA warns new government proposals could give the private sector an advantage in the commissioning support process

New proposals from the government would give the commercial sector an in-built advantage in the commissioning support process, the BMA has warned today.

Draft guidance from the Department of Health – ‘Developing commissioning support: Towards service excellence’ – makes a number of recommendations about how clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) should function from 2013, including how the technical and ‘back-office’ functions should be provided.

Current primary care trust (PCT) clusters are forming commissioning support units and from 2016 would be encouraged to form social enterprises and partner with the private sector.

These proposals would position commissioning support in a full-scale market and introduce commercially-focused criteria to determine who is eligible to provide this support.

These criteria would make it very difficult for CCGs to employ their own commissioning support staff and for NHS commissioning support bodies evolving from existing PCT clusters to compete against large, established commercial organisations, the BMA believes.

As such, CCGs would be left with little choice but to use these large, commercial organisations to provide a huge range of commissioning support services, from transactional services such as payroll and IT services, to equipping CCGs with the complex and sensitive population data that inform commissioning decisions.

There are significant concerns that this would lead to an imbalance of power between clinical commissioners and large, commercial providers of support, says the BMA, undermining the government’s proposals for genuine clinician-led and locally-focused commissioning.
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27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

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‘Proof’ government plans to privatise NHS? – Channel 4 News

Exclusive: GPs say they have firm evidence now that the government is planning to privatise the National Health Service as part of its reforms.

In a document seen by Channel 4 News, plans are laid out for how services will be bought for patients.

And family doctors say the details show for the first time the scale of the involvement of private companies. The document, Developing Commissioning Support: Towards Services Excellence, is a draft sent out to various health organisations.

Under the NHS reforms, GP practices will form consortia and they will manage about 60 per cent of England’s NHS budget. But it has been acknowledged that some GPs will not want to – or be capable of – managing such huge enterprises.

This document sets out how commissioning support units can be set up.
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Dr Jonathan Tomlinson, an east London GP and blogger, said: “The document says that GPs who are wanting to design services from their patients will have to get support from private companies. However that support is so comprehensive as to include absolutely everything that commissioning involves.

“In other words, looking at the needs of their local population, choosing and designing the services that they need, managing the contracts, monitoring the quality. There’s almost nothing left for us to do. And it even goes so far as saying that they can see a role for GPs perhaps in managing learning difficulties or other small local community services but even then private companies will be doing the directing.”

This all comes a fortnight after the Department of Health signed a deal with the private company, Circle, to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire. However, GPs say this document goes further. Circle will be in charge of “providing” a service. This will be the private sector purchasing patient care and ultimately deciding what they do and do not want to buy.
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The British Medical Association is now to discuss the document at its council meeting on Thursday. But Channel 4 News understands that members of the BMA’s GP committee reacted with fury when they were shown it last week and have demanded the leadership takes a stronger stand against the reforms.

The Royal College of GPs is also planning to discuss it at its next council meeting.

The think tank, the Kings Fund, said that it had always been acknowledged that GPs would not do the commissioning – or buying of care – on their own.

Professor Chris Ham, King’s Fund chief executive, said: “What GPs are worried about is that they will have to increasingly rely on the private sector to provide them with the expertise they need to manage £60bn of public money. There could be benefits from that if they get access to better, more expert people but of course there are real concerns this is a further step towards the privatisation of some aspects of NHS services.”
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Conservative election poster 2010

A recent news article about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

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Benefits appeals system ‘on brink of collapse’

Lord Freud, Tory welfare reform minister says that the Con-Dem coalition scum government want to stop GPs signing patients off on long-term sick leave. This appears to be a particularly ridiculous decision by the Con-Dem coalition scum government which ignores the fact that it is GPs that will have intimite knowledge of their patients’ health issues.

BMJ Careers reports that huge numbers of Consultants are taking early retirement because they’re angered by ongoinging changes to the NHS.

The Royal College of Nursing reports that 50,000 jobs are under threat or have already gone in the health service in England. The Con-Dem coalition scum government disputes the figure.

100,000 NHS workers are expected to participate in the 30th November day of action over public-sector pensions.

Two nonsense NHS stories.

Conservative election poster 2010

A few recent news articles about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

Benefits appeals system ‘on brink of collapse’ | Politics | The Guardian

C4 investigation reveals government’s work capability assessment programme is clogged with costly, unresolved cases

Thousands of ill and disabled people have become trapped in a revolving door of medical assessments and appeals at a cost of £80m, with many claimants on their second and third attempts to overturn rulings that remove their benefits.

The government’s drive to cut Britain’s multibillion-pound welfare bill by moving long-term unemployed people off sickness benefit and into work is at risk of descending into chaos, according to a Channel 4 news investigation.

The work capability assessment programme, which assesses benefit claimants to see whether they are fit for work is “teetering on the brink of collapse” as the system becomes clogged up with appeals.

Ministers introduced more stringent medical tests as part of welfare reforms designed to cut the number of people claiming incapacity benefits, currently at 2.4 million. They say sickness benefits are too often abused as an excuse for being out of work, and have pledged to end what they call the “something for nothing” culture.But the number of appeals by claimants who believe they have been incorrectly assessed as medically able to work has quadrupled in two years, with the projected numbers for 2011-12 expected to reach 240,000.
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GPs Should Lose Power To Sign Patients Off Long-Term, Argues Tory Minister

Stripping GPs of the power to sign patients off on long-term sick leave could lead to “fewer wasted lives”, a Tory minister has insisted.

Lord Freud said the Government wanted to intervene earlier to stop patients drifting into “unnecessary” on-going state support.

A Coalition-commissioned report due next week will recommend that independent assessors rule on long-term sickness instead of GPs.
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Government is embarking on the biggest shake-up of the welfare state since its formation and the reforms include reassessing all sickness benefit claimants and replacing sick notes with fit notes that set out what work individuals are able to carry out while ill.
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NHS Dissatisfaction Linked To More Consultants Retiring Early, UK

A report by BMJ Careers today shows that the number of consultants who take voluntary early retirement in 2011 has soared up by almost three quarters compared with 2010. According to the BMA, this staggering rate reflects consultants’ growing dissatisfaction in terms of the ongoing changes within the NHS.

The report, based on new data obtained from the NHS Business Services Authority Pensions Division demonstrates that the number of consultants who have opted for voluntary early retirement before the age of 60 has risen by 72.4% from 2010 to 2011. Whilst 98 consultants opted for voluntary early retirement in 2010, the numbers increased to 169 in 2011. The proportion of consultants opting for early retirement has almost doubled over the last 5 years from 7.3% in 2006 to 14.0% in 2011. 


Deputy chairman of the BMA’s Consultants Committee, Ian Wilson explained that the reasons why many consultants chose to retire at the earliest possible opportunity is based on a combination of factors, including changes to NHS pensions, working increasingly long hours and increased work intensity, partly caused because of less junior doctors’ being available due to working time restrictions, as well as the reform of the NHS.

Dr. Wilson declared:

“Anecdotally doctors are telling us all the time that if they could retire, they would retire, whereas in the past doctors tended to want to carry on for as long as they were able to. People are feeling disempowered by NHS structures and NHS functioning, and there’s an attraction for people to retire from the rat race.”


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BBC News – Nearly 50,000 NHS jobs ‘under threat’

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The RCN has been closely monitoring job cuts since April 2010.

The posts it has identified have either being lost already or are due to be cut by March 2015.

Many of them do not involve redundancies as the NHS tends to cut posts by not replacing staff who leave or retire.

The total highlighted – 48,029 – is the equivalent of shutting four large hospital trusts.

It includes all types of staff from administrators and porters to doctors and nurses.

The union also carried out an in-depth look at 41 trusts where cuts were being made.

In total, nearly half of the posts under threat were clinical and the scale of the cutbacks represented nearly a tenth of the workforce on average.

In the worst cases over 20% of the workforce was due to be culled.

The RCN said the findings were proof that the savings the NHS has to make – £20bn over the next four years – could not simply be achieved through efficiencies.
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Related: RCN: NHS heading for crisis point as job losses mount – RCN Ministers deny claims of cutting clinical jobs in NHS | Society | The Observer

More than 100,000 vote for pensions walkout | News | Nursing Times

More than 100,000 NHS workers have now voted to strike against changes to pensions, after two more unions announced their ballot results this week.
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Nonsense:
NHS introduces £1,500 talking plate which warns obese families about their eating habits | Mail Online

NHS paramedics given bullet-proof jackets over fears of a Mumbai-style terrorist attack | Mail Online

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Why cuts are the wrong cure from False Economy on Vimeo.

Growing waiting lists force the Con-Dem scum government to introduce waiting list targets.

Labour pledges to repeal NHS bill when they are re-elected.

GMB union to join the 30th Novermber public sector strike on the Con-Dem government attack on pensions.

Stafford Hospital is employing army medics to keep its Accident & Emergency department open. I didn’t realise that army medics had proper qualifications.

Wake Up Call Episode 2 “A Betrayal of Trust” from Health Emergency on Vimeo.

Conservative election poster 2010

A few recent news articles about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

NHS waiting times force coalition U-turn on targets | Society | The Guardian

The government has been forced to abandon its opposition to NHS waiting time targets and introduce a new rule to halt the growing number of patients not being treated within the promised 18 weeks.

The U-turn is a surprise because the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, had previously criticised waiting times measures introduced by Labour to speed up patient care as “arbitrary Whitehall targets”.

But fresh evidence that waiting times are creeping up, despite David Cameron’s pledge to keep them low, has forced Lansley to change tack and impose an extra treatment directive on the NHS. He had previously castigated targets as unnecessary, likely to distort NHS staff’s clinical priorities and part of a bureaucratic “top-down” system he intended to overhaul.

It has been prompted by the disclosure that, among the 2.6m patients waiting for treatment at any time, almost 250,000 (9.4%) do not get treated within the 18 weeks guaranteed in the NHS constitution. Among these, about 20,000 patients have been left untreated for at least a year.

On Thursday Lansley warned the NHS in England that, as of next year, no more than 8% of all patients waiting at any one time would be allowed to have had their treatment delayed by 18 weeks or more.
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Labour pledges to repeal NHS bill | Society | The Guardian

All provisions that turns health and social care services into a market-based system will be removed, says Andy Burnham

Labour have pledged to repeal the coalition’s controversial health and social care bill if they are re-elected, opening a new front in the debate over the NHS’s future.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham committed the party to undoing the proposed radical reorganisation of the English NHS in a speech on Wednesday. “Labour will inherit a very different NHS – lots of damage will have already been done. And let me make it clear – if the bill in parliament goes through, we will repeal it”, he told delegates at the Royal College of Midwives’s annual conference in Brighton.

“We will return the NHS to a national system based on the principle of collaboration on which it was founded in 1948,” added Burnham, who also emphasised that, in making that pledge he was “not talking about protecting the status quo”.

His remarks are likely to be welcomed by medical organisations and campaigners against health secretary Andrew Lansley’s planned legislation, which has been approved by the House of Commons and is currently in its committee stage in the House of Lords.

But a source close to Lansley claimed Burnham, Labour’s last health secretary who returned to the shadow role in shadow cabinet reshuffle, was in effect proposing yet another restructuring of the NHS which staff would not support.
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GMB Set to Join Nov. 30 Walkout over Pensions – International Business Times

The GMB has voted to join a national strike over pensions to be held later this month.

The Nov. 30 walkout has been planned in protest against public sector pension reforms. A total of 33 percent of GMB members met and voted in favour of the strike by more than 4-1.

“It is now clear that millions of workers will be protesting on 30 November at the government’s attack on jobs and pensions,” GMB National Secretary Brian Strutton said.

Although the union has voted to join the strike, Strutton said there was still time for the government to negotiate and settle the issue of public sector pensions.

Strutton added: “The government has already accepted that the original proposals were unfair and wrong. It is not too late for the government to pull back from this confrontation and scrap this attack on pensions.”

The GMB is one of the UK’s largest unions with more than 600,000 members, including NHS and local government workers from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

UCATT, the union of construction workers, also voted recently to join the strike.

The strike, originally called by the TUC, has the support of 15 unions protesting against the government’s proposal to make public sector workers pay more and work longer to earn their pensions.
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Army medics drafted in to keep NHS hospital running – mirror.co.uk

ARMY medics have been drafted in to keep an NHS hospital running for the first time in Britain – because it does not have enough staff.

Stafford Hospital has been forced in to the move to keep its accident and emergency department open during the day.

But the hospital, which is currently at the centre of an inquiry into hundreds of deaths between 2005 and 2008, will still shut A&E at night due to staff shortages.

And the situation will reach crisis when the military medics pull out.

The hospital offered £100,000 salaries and £500 per extra four-hour shifts, but its poor reputation and a national shortage of NHS consultants made hiring impossible.

So two emergency consultants, used to battlefield medicine, and four senior nurses also provided by the Ministry of Defence will keep the ward open.

But Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust chiefs decided the department, which has only four of the six consultants it needs, must shut between 10pm and 8am from December 1 for three months. And the Trust admitted without “urgent action”, there “will be significant risks following withdrawal of the military support”.
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