Now, I’m not usually one for using conservative language, but in regards to the new NHS reforms, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Now of course we all remember the famous airbrushed poster of DC and his pledge for a real terms increase in the NHS budget and no top down reorganisations which were both broken. Now if you thought this was bad enough, this bill coming into parliament is something more deeply disturbing.
For a start, shifting the £80 billion budget onto GPs is just something clompletely ludicrous, no patient wants their GP to be distracted from their real task of helping their patients. But, sadly enough, it goes deeper than that. For the first time in it’s entire existance, the NHS will be subject to EU competition law, that’s right, subject to competition law. The NHS is a service, it is literally in the name, nothing less. When it comes to people lives and health it´s intrinsically wrong to have price competition to ordain which sevices live or die.
Labour made huge improvements in the NHS over 13 years in government. Yes, it is still far from perfect, but these reforms could well destroy the Coalition. But this is what can happen when you gamble with people’s lives and health.
Max
This was the best possible image you could have used to illustrate Cameron’s ulterior motives and duplicity at the election. It is deeply distrurbing that the ‘N’ is being removed from the NHS, as different areas will have different levels of provision and a different quality of service. The reforms haven’t even been completed yet and already we saw its effects during the recent swine flu outbreak, where rural consortia had surplus stocks of the vaccine but cities like Birmingham were running low. The Coalition seems to think GPs, qualified and committed as they are, have the mystical power to see into the future when ordering drugs etc for their practices; have business acumen as well as medical expertise; and have the time to fit all of this on top of their actual job, which is treating patients. It may only be symbolism, but the appearance of surgeries at shopping malls and so on is going to be pretty depressing.
The NHS is the UK’s most cherished institution, employing a vast swathe of the public sector workforce, yet it has had constant reorganisations and reforms in its short life. Say what you like about targets, but the facts speak for themselves: compare waiting lists in 1997 to A&E referral times in 2010. The doctors don’t want these ‘reforms’, the BMA don’t want them, the Conservative backbenchers don’t seem to want them, and, most critically, neither do the patients.
Aneurin Bevan (I naturally had to bring him in to this somewhere) famously knew that if his experiment in the wonderful valleys town of Tredegar was to manifest itself nationwide, he needed to have the doctors on side, and, after much wrangling and compromise, he achieved this. What would he be thinking now. Very occasionally it is right to be conservative with a small ‘c’.