A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
I’m going to be there to defend the NHS. I’ll be with a very large group from Kingston hospital, where I work, and a couple of my grandchildren, and we’ll all be carrying two flipping heavy banners.
We feel the NHS is under attack. Before the last election, Nick Clegg and David Cameron used Kingston hospital as a backdrop to say that the NHS would be safe in their hands. But now the government has said the NHS must have £20bn worth of efficiency savings, despite maintaining that no frontline staff will be cut. And at Kingston we have been told that over the next four years we will be losing nearly 500 staff – 20% of whom are nurses and doctors. Now, if that ain’t frontline staff, then what is?
The hospital is saying that no services will be affected. Yeah, right. It is also saying there will be no redundancies. I half-believe that, because it could achieve staff reductions through people retiring. But it ain’t about redundancies: it’s about the service. You can’t run a hospital without the staff. At Kingston, we have 22 consultants, and 214 nurses and midwives. They’re not exactly sitting in the cupboard twiddling their thumbs.
NHS satisfaction levels have reached a record high among the public and employees, according to the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey.
The latest BSA survey found that 64 per cent of the British public were either very or quite satisfied with the NHS – representing the highest levels since the survey began in 1983.
The results coincided with findings from the 2010 annual NHS staff survey, which reported record levels of job satisfaction in the NHS. Three quarters said they were satisfied by the quality of work and patient care they delivered, while 90 per cent were happy with the difference they made to patients.
The government has shown that when it comes to pay in the NHS its prefers the smart Saville Row suit of the bankers to the uniform of a hard-working nurse.
Unite, the largest union in the country, said it verged on the grotesque that the NHS Pay Review Body (PRB) was marginalised by the government’s public sector pay freeze policy, while on the other hand, ministers allowed bankers’ bonuses to let rip at the 83 per cent state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
Unite national officer Rachael Maskell said today (Monday 21 March): ”It is quite clear who wields the influence in the corridors of Whitehall – the well-suited investment banker – and not hardworking public sector staff, who are being made to pay, through higher taxes and reduced living standards, for the financial crisis the banking elite created in the first place.
Patients in NHS hospitals are being fed cheaper food than prison inmates, it was revealed yesterday.
Spending on hospital food has been slashed by up to two-thirds over the last five years, according to official figures.
In some hospitals in England budgets have fallen by 62 per cent – with meals costing little more than £1. That’s just half the £2.10 spent on the average meal in jail.
Three Royal College of Nursing members handed a letter co-signed by nearly 23,000 members to 11 Downing Street, to express concerns about cuts to NHS frontline services.
Salma Bilkis, Lee Thomas and Kevin Takooree were joined by Janet Davies, the RCN’s Director of Nursing and Service Delivery, when they handed in the letter at the official residence of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.
The letter was handed in as Mr Osborne prepared to deliver his latest Budget. The UK is braced for massive cuts in public services, but the Coalition Government has said NHS spending is ring-fenced.
A Westcountry MP will today come face-to-face with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in the wake of claims that his reforms risk destroying the NHS.
Sarah Wollaston, GP-turned-Tory MP for Totnes, has warned that the Government is in danger of creating a “Trojan horse” that could undermine the NHS from within.
In outspoken remarks, Dr Wollaston said the controversial re-organisation risked changing the NHS “beyond recognition” and was “doomed to fail”.
The Unions are promoting their anti-cuts March for an Alternative event next weekend. There will be a march topped with a rally at Hyde Park. There are rumours that Labour Party leader Ed Miliband will address the rally. It’s disappointing that the unions are still so subservient to the Labour Party after all these years.
Andrew Lansley and the Department of Health are accused of manipulating the presentation – spinning – of the proposed abolition of the NHS by supressing evidence that there is widespread satisfaction with the NHS.
The BMA have published an open letter after their special meeting called for the Destruction of the NHS bill to be withdrawn.
Conservative election poster 2010
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
Union leaders are to target Liberal Democrats in a campaign to slow down the speed and scale of public spending cuts as the TUC prepares for the biggest protest yet against the coalition’s economic programme.
Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, hopes to exploit unrest in Lib Dem ranks to step up pressure on a party leadership which he believes is increasingly isolated from its activists.
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday before next weekend’s anti-cuts rally in central London, Mr Barber attacked the Lib Dems for abandoning their pre-election pledge to delay cuts until the economy was growing. Stressing that the campaign will be a “long haul”, he vowed to step up the political pressure on ministers and coalition MPs to “realise quite how out of touch they are with the wider public”.
Andrew Lansley is preparing himself for another bad week at the Department of Health after two new crises hit his plans for NHS reform.
The health secretary was accused of “burying good news” after reports emerged that his department sat on reports showing unprecedented satisfaction with the health service.
Meanwhile, a Tory MP and doctor laid into the reforms in the Daily Telegraph, saying they could change the NHS “beyond recognition”.
The developments follow a tough week for the health secretary, whose reforms have been criticised by health experts, unions, Labour MPs and some Tory backbenchers.
The NHS risks being changed beyond recognition by the Coalition’s health reforms, a Conservative doctor claimed yesterday.
Sarah Wollaston, MP for Totnes and a practising GP, branded the reorganisation a ‘Trojan horse’.
In the most scathing attack yet on the plans of Conservative Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, she said that key elements of the shake-up – the biggest in the Health Service’s 60-year history – were ‘doomed to fail’.
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I find the second featured article interesting. The article recognises the importance that Lansley was formerly Cameron’s boss and suggests that Cameron was not interested or aware of the extent of Lansley’s ‘reforms’.
In a related exercise, I have been trying to nail down the origin of this movement to destroy the NHS. I suspect that it may be criticism of the National Health Service by American politicians in 2008 / 2009. These criticisms were made in response to Hillary Clinton’s manouvers concerning health care reform for the poor. Clinton’s proposals were only ever posturings – there was never any serious intentions.
It is disappointing that UK Neo-Cons suck up so much to their insane US masters. USUK.
Conservative election poster 2010
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
CAMPAIGNERS will today hand over a petition signed by more than 150,000 people to MP John Pugh opposing plans to radically reform the NHS.
Members of campaign group 38 Degrees will tell the Lib Dem health spokesman of the dangers of the proposed Health and Social Bill.
The proposed Coalition legislation will hand 80% of the NHS budget to consortia of GPs, who will buy services from providers in the public, private and charity sectors.
But there are fears that NHS hospitals will go bust if private firms grab large chunks of their revenue by cherry-picking the easiest treatments.
The great NHS storm that has beset politics was one that few saw coming. There were voices, and I hope a touch of self-congratulation on the part of the Guardian might be forgiven here, who warned before the election that Andrew Lansley was quietly drawing up plans that might explode the moment they met daylight. And so it has come to pass.
In part, of course, the calm before the storm arose because of what the Conservatives did not say. Lansley’s shock therapy was referred to in only the most oblique terms in the Tory manifesto, while the coalition agreement described an entirely different package, which involved democratising primary care trusts instead of abolishing them. In part, however, it has to do with the measured personal style of Lansley himself.
A former civil servant, who in the distant past worked for Norman Tebbit, he retains something of the mandarin’s technocratic manner. That is only reinforced by his extraordinary tenure over the health portfolio, which has been in his grasp since Iain Duncan Smith’s day, some seven years ago. Sure of his terrain, he avoided all the obvious elephant traps on the cusp of the 2010 election, and he made the shrewd choice to hug the doctors close, even querying Gordon Brown’s plans to extend GP opening hours, to ensure that the trusted voice of the profession would not rail against him in opposition.
…
The reaction against the health bill is rapidly moving from silent to violent, as the world wakes up to what it will mean. After those air-brushed election posters about “cutting the deficit, not the NHS” David Cameron’s personal reputation is very much at risk. Only when the memoirs are written will we discover whether he ever intended to allow the mild-mannered Lansley to gamble with a service that he once described as “a wonderful fact of British life”.
The founding principles of the NHS are in danger of being wiped out by Government plans to overhaul the health service, an MP has warned.
Oldham East and Saddleworth MP Debbie Abrahams said the health reforms had no mandate from the British people and no support from health professionals nor the Lib-Dems who are in coalition with the Tories.
Mrs Abrahams said: “Not only are the founding principles of the NHS in danger of being wiped out, but its culture — the reason that most of its employees work for the NHS — will go as well.
“The whole ethos of the NHS will change. It will now be driven by competition and consumer interests.”
Health union Unison warned today against the government’s vicious local authority spending cuts following evidence that the NHS will be forced to pick up the pieces of a £1 billion gap in social care funding.
Health think tank the King’s Fund revealed that the NHS will come under increasing pressure from people whose needs are not met by local authority services.
The fund warned that local authority social care services face a funding gap in excess of at least £1.2bn by 2014-15.
Paul Blomfield MP yesterday attacked the Tory/Lib Dem government’s plans to drastically restructure the NHS which he warned will create a two-tier health system, and encourage the privatisation of the NHS. Mr Blomfield urged the Government to abandon their NHS plans and listen to the British Medical Association who at an emergency conference on Tuesday urged the Government to think again.
Paul Blomfield MP said in his speech that: “The proposals reveal the ideological heart of the Government and their vision for public services: a two-tier health system, with the best available for those who can afford it, and the NHS becoming a safety net for those who cannot.”
Speaking after the debate Paul said: “I’m very disappointed that Lib Dem MPs failed to support Labour in defending the NHS from the Tory attack on it. The Lib Dem MPs have ignored the vote at their conference in Sheffield last weekend which rejected the NHS reforms and they’ve let down their voters.
Earlier this week Labour launched a petition calling on David Cameron to protect frontline services in the NHS and keep his pre-General Election promise to put an end to big top down reorganisations. Labour secured an opposition day debate on Tory plans to reorganise the NHS after the plans were rejected by the Liberal Democrats at their Spring Conference and condemned by the British Medical Association at their extraordinary general meeting last week.
John Denham, Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, said: “GPs don’t want the Tories’ NHS reforms, Lib Dems don’t want the Tories and the public don’t want the Tories’ NHS reforms. We beat the Government on the forests and I know we can beat them on the NHS reforms if we all work together.”
John Healey, Shadow Health Secretary, added: “David Cameron has scrapped Labour’s waiting time guarantees for hospital treatments and GP appointments, and he’s cutting frontline staff while wasting £2billion on a reckless reorganisation.
The guide to the “unprecedented” restructuring of the health service in England points out that previous reforms had a “negative effect” on services, staff morale and productivity.
It claims that “quality of care provided to patients” and “continuity of services” is in danger as tiers of management are removed and experience staff leave.
And the paper, signed by senior civil servants including the Chief Executive of the NHS, reminds staff that the Government’s reforms are taking place at the same time as £20billion in efficiency savings must be made.
The threatened NHS has been much in all our minds this week, and, pestered by online petitions and appeals for support, I’ve been going over my long relationship with it. Our experiences of the NHS are woven deeply into the fabric of our lives, and most of mine have been good. All my children were born and cared for on the NHS, and have been well served by it. And for those nearing the end of life, my GP used to bake and ice a cake for each of his patients who reached the age of 100.
It has been a recurrent theme in my fiction, as it has been an integral part of my life. The narrator of The Millstone (1966), a young unmarried mother, in a central confrontational scene, actually delivers herself of the line “I love the National Health Service”, while insisting on access to her sick baby in Great Ormond Street hospital. How things have changed since then, and sometimes for the better. When I went to visit my granddaughter a few years ago, as she recovered from minor surgery, the atmosphere was festive. Our generation of mothers had complained, we had made ourselves heard, and life on the wards had improved. That’s how it worked, and should work. It is for us, it is ours, and the professionals do listen.
And now we seem to be on the brink of losing all of this. It isn’t wholly unexpected. I predicted creeping privatisation in my 1996 satirical condition-of-England novel, The Witch of Exmoor, written at the somewhat ridiculous and squalid end of the failing Major government. We had already become wary about the selling off of public assets and services into private hands – gas, water, prisons, railways. One of the novel’s more sympathetic characters, an advertising man, works for a firm which is given the task of updating “the corporate image of the National Health Service”.
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
Research involving 1,645 BMA members polled about the government’s health and social care bill has found that 89% think increased competition will lead to fragmentation of services, while 66% believe that the move for all NHS acute providers to reside within foundation trusts will damage NHS values.
The poll, conducted online in January by Ipsos Mori, also shows that nearly 60% of those surveyed think health secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans will have a negative impact on their personal role within the NHS, with 31% saying it will be a major one and 27% saying it will be minor. A specific concern, feared by a majority of those polled, is that the reforms will mean they spend less time with patients – something opposed by almost all those questioned.
Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of council at the BMA, said that the results show that the government “can no longer claim widespread support among doctors”.
In just six days, the petition to tell the government to Save The NHS has been signed by an incredible 175,000 members. We’ve only just finished voting on which campaigns to work on together over the next few weeks, and now we’ve already managed to build 38 Degrees’ fastest-ever growing petition!
While the petition is growing fast, 52,000 of us have shared it on Facebook, thousands more spread the petition on Twitter, hundreds of members organised local meetings and have spoken to their local MP, and the petition has only just been launched!
The media have noticed too. On Monday the Independent said, ”The campaign group 38 Degrees – which was instrumental in forcing the Government to drop its plans to sell off parts of Britain’s forests – collected more than 80,000 signatures against the plans over the weekend.”
If you haven’t already, please sign the petition and share with your friends and family.
The “creeping privatisation” of the NHS will affect patient care, top doctors have warned, saying the government’s planned shakeup risks hospitals losing key services, critical research being jeopardised and public goodwill for blood donations disappearing as private firms are seen to profit from public funds.
Medical leaders fear the controversial switch to allow “any willing provider” – voluntary, public or private – to supply care services in the NHS will fragment the system. Driven by the need to save £20bn from NHS budgets, the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, plans to increase commercialisation and competition across the health service – with no part off limits.
Already, large elements of the health service are falling into private hands. Last September, Serco, the multinational services company with an empire stretching from railways to maintaining ballistic missiles, became the UK’s largest provider of pathology services, a market worth £2.5bn, with the takeover of King’s hospital laboratories in London.
The government’s plans to outsource more NHS services have left many in the public sector with a bitter taste in their mouth and the private sector positively drooling. In the coming years, an array of health services is likely to be outsourced despite little evidence that it would improve efficiency and make savings. This will see a push to further privatise clinical services such as radiology and pathology – the latter worth £2.5bn per year. The government has recently been in talks about privatising part of the NHS blood service to make it more “commercially effective”.
Even NHS Direct is in the firing line with Capita – a company reported to the Office of Fair Trading two years ago for allegedly overcharging schools by £75m for IT contracts – lined up to manage the contract, according to reports. Major off-shoring is also on the agenda. John Neilson, head of NHS Shared Business Services, said recently that the NHS should outsource the administration of procurement to call centres in India to save £20bn over the next four years. For private companies eyeing a slice of the NHS pie, it gets better: NHS Trusts may ultimately come under private ownership with many of the services they manage also outsourced.
Areas such as estates management, worth about £7bn per year, and back-office functions such as HR and IT are also prime targets to be transferred to private owners.
West Cornwall MP Andrew George is calling for cross-party support in an effort to block the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill.
Speaking during an initial debate on the bill in Parliament, Mr George said that the future of the NHS is more important than party political point scoring. He called for MPs to come together and to see if the Health Secretary and his fellow Ministers were really “listening” to concerns as they had claimed they were.
After the debate, Mr George said that he would be seeking a meeting of MPs and other stakeholders (including the BMA, Kings Fund, Royal Colleges, etc) before the Bill comes back to the main chamber of the House of Commons for its report stage after the Easter recess.
Simon Burns, the ebullient health minister and understudy to Andrew Lansley, has been sporting a new haircut this week in preparation for being made a privy counsellor. But his promotion as a confidant of the Queen hardly compensates for the terrible pounding he and Lansley, not to mention the Liberal Democrat health minister Paul Burstow, have been taking over the NHS proposals. One suspects the Queen might be quietly asking him what he thinks he is doing meddling with the health service.
Ministers certainly feel they are being hit from every side after they formally lost the support of the Lib Dems on Saturday, the British Medical Association on Tuesday and the former Blairite health secretary Alan Milburn on Wednesday.
For David Cameron it is now double or quits. He has a limited amount of political capital. Should he expend it on defending the plans as they stand or signal some big rethink? Half-measures are pointless. He has shown himself willing to compromise on school sport, forests and some welfare changes. But to delay the health shakeup, or change it at its core, would be a retreat of an entirely different order.
Monitor, the taxpayer-funded body that regulates the health service, will have to spend millions more to keep the Health Secretary’s free-for-all in check.
The Government quango could see its budget jump from £20million a year to £130million to cope with the changes, it has emerged.
It makes a mockery of David Cameron’s claim that the Coalition plans, which hand 80% of the NHS budget for doctors to spend how they want, will “abolish” bureaucracy in the health service.
Yesterday’s vote by the BMA to call on Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to withdraw the abolition of the NHS bill.
Andrew Lansley’s response needs to be fact-checked e.g. that the BMA previously supported parts of the bill.
The Labour Party has belatedly joined the campaign to oppose the abolition of the NHS. Belatedly because they appear to have joined the campaign once it was assured widespread support – after both the Liberal Democrats and the BMA have declared that they oppose the decimation of the NHS.
The Labour Party response – a petition – is pathetically inadequate.
It is interesting that Liberal Democrat MPs are mandated to vote with Labour MPs to oppose the bill.
Conservative election poster 2010
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
At a committee stage meeting on the reforms on Tuesday, the shadow health team was set to demand the removal of the whole middle third of the Bill, which opens up commissioning to ‘any willing provider’.
This section will grant the regulator Monitor powers to fine commissioning groups up to 10% of their turnover for anti-competitive practice, Labour claims. The powers would be in line with those currently exercised by the Office of Fair Trading.
Speaking at a press briefing before the committee meeting, Shadow health minister John Healey said the Health and Social Care Bill will expose the NHS to full force of competition law.
Doctors have voted to call on the government to scrap its plans for overhauling the NHS.
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, is coming under increasing pressure over his reforms, which involve the abolition of more than 150 organisations and moving 80% of the NHS budget into the hands of GPs.
Some doctors support the content of the health and social care bill, currently going through parliament, but many have been voicing opposition to parts of it, including increasing the role of private companies in delivering healthcare.
Today the British Medical Association (BMA) held an emergency meeting attended by almost 400 doctors to debate the plans.
Doctors voted in favour of calling on Lansley to withdraw the bill entirely and for a “halt to the proposed top-down reorganisation of the NHS”.
The Government is coming under increasing pressure over its NHS reforms after doctors voted for the plans to be dropped.
Delegates at an emergency meeting said Health Secretary Andrew Lansley should withdraw the Health and Social Care Bill, and “halt the proposed top-down reorganisation of the NHS”.
Some doctors support the Bill, currently going through parliament, which would see more than 150 organisations abolished and 80% of the NHS budget pass into the hands of GPs.
But many have been voicing their opposition, including to increasing the role of private companies in delivering healthcare.
The emergency meeting of the British Medical Association (BMA) comes as Labour tabled amendments to the Bill, saying there was a need to protect the NHS against the introduction of a full-blown competitive market.
More than 220,000 jobs are under threat in councils, the NHS, education and other parts of the public sector because of the Government’s spending cuts, according to a new study.
The GMB union, which has been tracking job loss announcements in councils for months, said that when other parts of the public sector were included, the toll of job cuts was “shocking”.
Over 170,000 posts were under threat at 318 local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland, but when planned cuts in the NHS, universities and Government departments were included, the total was 226,000, said the union.
Doctors overwhelmingly followed disaffected Liberal Democrats on Wednesday in condemning government plans to break apart the NHS.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is forging enemies left, right and centre over his flagship “reform” plan, as the British Medical Association became the latest to vote against it at an emergency meeting attended by almost 400 doctors.
The deeply unpopular Health and Social Care Bill, currently at the committee stage in Parliament, was also voted against by Lib Dems at their party’s spring conference in Sheffield on the weekend.
The Government’s reforms of the NHS are coming under attack from health campaigners and unions.
Q: What will the shake-up do?
A: Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has unveiled plans to change the way the NHS works in England, saying they will improve patient care.
Under proposals in the Health and Social Care Bill, GPs will take control of 80% of the NHS budget – some £80 billion a year – and hospitals will be given more freedom from central Government.
The aim is for groups of GPs to be ready to commission services from April 2013.
It is unclear exactly how many of these GP consortia plan to do the work themselves and how many will buy-in outside expertise.
An NHS Commissioning Board will oversee the way services are bought, and primary care trusts and strategic health authorities, which currently hold the purse strings, will be scrapped.
The move is a major overhaul and will lead to more than 150 organisations being abolished and thousands of job losses.
Since the General Election, the British public has seen David Cameron break promise after promise on the NHS despite promising that it was a top priority.
Labour’s petition to protect frontline services, launched today, calls on David Cameron to keep his promises to:
* Protect frontline NHS services;
* Stop precious NHS money being wasted on a big top-down reorganisation, which is putting the NHS at risk;
* Provide the real increase he promised in NHS funding.
Among the 50 GPs feted by the prime minister in January at a champagne reception in Downing Street were the leading lights of the National Association of Primary Care, a group of family doctors who many see as the brains behind health secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans.
The physicians sipping bubbly at No 10 were part of the first wave of GP shadow consortiums – doctors tasked with reshaping hospital services in the runup to finally being handed the NHS purse strings. Treading the corridors of power that chilly winter evening was Charles Alessi, an executive member of the NAPC, who two weeks earlier had penned a tabloid comment piece backing the radical pro-market plans of the government.
While the association is careful to say it is not aligned to any party, it did come up with the central plank of the health secretary’s policy: dissolve England’s primary care trusts, which currently commission hospital care on behalf of patients, and instead allow GP practices, essentially private businesses run by doctors, to form consortiums to buy treatments using £80bn of Treasury money. The loss of the primary care trusts will see 24,000 jobs go.
For the first time all England’s 38,000 general practitioners will, under the government’s plans, be directly responsible for access to expensive hospital treatments through referrals. Those family doctors who manage to stay within budget – and perhaps even save the taxpayer money – will get cash bonuses.
No 10 responded to the British Medical Association vote on NHS reforms by describing the general meeting as unrepresentative of the BMA membership, adding it was disappointed it had decided to oppose reforms it had previously supported.
Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, has insisted he will only be making minor changes to the language of the health and social care bill in response to the Liberal Democrat decision to oppose it. A discussion is now under way inside the coalition on how to respond, with some influential cabinet figures arguing Lansley has to recast a bill that is losing support daily.
Labour is to stage a debate on health on Wednesday with a motion broadly designed to mirror the Liberal Democrats’ objections to the bill, which were passed in a weekend motion at its conference in Sheffield. Liberal Democrat MPs met on Tuesday to decide how to vote in the Commons debate, but are not expected to vote with Labour.
GPs could more than double their income to £300,000 a year under health secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans for the NHS, according to an analysis for the Guardian – sparking calls from top doctors for the government to reverse controversial policies that would appear to reward physicians who ration care.
The revelation comes after the British Medical Association voted to scrap the “dangerous” health bill and demanded that Lansley rethink his radical pro-market changes to the NHS.
GPs are central to the government’s programme, and by 2013 will have to band together into consortiums before being handed £80bn of NHS funds to commission care for their patients.
At the heart of many doctors’ concerns lies the possibility that, under the reforms, GPs’ pay will be linked to rationing patient care; in essence, being rewarded for saving the taxpayer money. Doctors’ leaders warned that the public would view as “unethical” any move towards a GP’s assessment of a person’s medical need being coloured by a profit motive.
It is a serious matter that the British Medical Association has called an emergency meeting – the first of its kind for nearly 20 years – to warn the Government to think again about the pace and scale of its reforms to the National Health Service. The aims of those reforms might be laudable. The Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, says he wants to set the NHS free from political interference and make it more responsive to patients. And he is right to say that with an ageing population making increasing demands on services, and the cost of drugs and new treatments rising, change is needed.
But he has set in train the biggest reorganisation in the 62-year history of the NHS – at a time when it is being asked to save £20bn from its £100bn budget. And he has done so despite a Tory pledge before the election that there would be no major overhaul of the health service. Doctors’ leaders have rightly complained that the detail on the massive changes were not available at all until the Bill was published two months ago. Mr Lansley’s reforms have been premised on ideological conviction rather than pragmatism; pilot projects should have been trialled first rather than in parallel with the passage of a Bill which is already well on its way through Parliament. No wonder Liberal Democrat delegates rejected the plans at the party’s spring conference last weekend.
Doctors’ leaders yesterday stopped short of a vote of no confidence in Health Secretary Andrew Lansley but demanded that he halt his plans to reform the NHS and condemned his failure to act on their concerns.
In what is turning out to be a torrid week for the Health Secretary, the British Medical Association (BMA) called on him to withdraw the Health and Social Care Bill, now going through Parliament, and warned that it would lead to the “fragmentation” and “privatisation” of the NHS.
However, the BMA failed to back a vote of no confidence and stopped short of condemning its leadership for pursuing a policy of “critical engagement” with the Government rather than outright opposition to the Bill, after an appeal from the chairman, Hamish Meldrum, not to “tie our hands”.
The Government’s NHS reforms face their biggest challenge yet, after Liberal Democrats at their party’s spring conference voted to oppose key parts of the health bill.
In a motion passed in Sheffield on Saturday, the party committed to demand new safeguards are written into the bill to limit the role of private firms and effectively return to the previous Government’s policy of the NHS as the ‘preferred provider’.
The motion was an embarrassment to Liberal Democrat health minister Paul Burstow, whose original motion overwhelmingly supported the reforms, and leaves health secretary Andrew Lansley now facing having to re-negotiate the terms of the bill, or see Liberal Democrats vote against them.
Why is the government planning a big shakeup of the NHS in England?
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, says that while the NHS is world-class in some respects, and employs leading medical figures, it is still not good enough in some key areas of care. “For example, rates of mortality amenable to healthcare, rates of mortality for some respiratory diseases and some cancers, and some measures of stroke, have been among the worst in the developed world. International evidence also shows the NHS has much further to go on managing care more effectively,” says the Department of Health. Doctors have cast doubt on the evidence underpinning some of Lansley’s claims about the quality of NHS care, and critics argue that his “modernisation” changes will usher in widespread privatisation of NHS services.
What is the government proposing?
Arguably the most radical restructuring of the NHS since it was created in 1948. England’s 150 or so primary care trusts will be wound up in 2013 and their work, commissioning healthcare, will pass to groups of GPs called general practice commissioning consortiums (GPCCs). Each GPCC, perhaps including scores of existing practices, will have its own budget. The consortiums will have £80bn of NHS funds in all, and agree contracts with hospitals and others. Almost 200 GPCCs have already been set up.
The British Medical Association said health secretary Andrew Lansley should dump his bill and adopt an ‘evolution not revolution’ approach.
While agreeing with some central points, such as clinicians having more of a say in decision making and better information for patients, doctors argued the proposals went too far, too fast.
BMA chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum addressed almost 400 doctors at the meeting in central London, saying reforms could have ‘irreversible consequences’.
He said: ‘But, as on so many occasions, it’s the reality not the rhetoric that counts and it’s the reality that is causing all the problems.
‘Because what we have seen is an often contradictory set of proposals, driven by ideology rather than evidence, enshrined in ill-thought-through legislation and implemented in a rush during a major economic downturn.’
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans to reform the NHS have been heavily criticised by doctors, but they stopped short of rejecting the Health and Social Care Bill outright.
Approximately 400 doctors attended an emergency meeting called by the British Medical Association (BMA) in London to debate and vote on the government’s reforms, with 43% in favour of rejecting the Bill completely, with 54% against, and 3% abstaining.
They called on Mr Lansley to “adopt an approach of evolution not revolution regarding any changes to the NHS in England” and that the government must respond to criticisms regarding the Bill and accept ministers had “no electoral mandate” for the plans.
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.
