http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13063285

My (orange, and speaker-insulting) MP is involved in this train wreck. His reply to my message a week or so ago was not promising.

TBH most doctors have no confidence in Lansley either!

As usual, they're ignoring the advice of the health profession, steam rolling ahead and will manage to put the blame on GPs when it all goes t*ts up.

This will eventually destroy the NHS as the private contractors will cherry pick the bulk of the easy profitable proceedures leaving the NHS hospitals with only the expensive emergency work and little in the way of training doctors because basic proceedures will be done privately and there will be no way for a NHS doctor to gain experience within the NHS. Longer term it will cause serious problems with consultancy work as well.

Completely agree and this is the view with most doctors - things aren't going to improve for the best, they'll be for the worse.

I think it's in Iceland, where although there are medical schools, there is no postgraduate training. So everyone goes to medical school, then has to go outside Iceland to try to find a training job, become specialists/GPs etc and then go back to work. This is what will end up happening and in the meantime, you'll continue to get brain-drain (ie poaching doctors from other countries) to fill in the stop-gap whilst awaiting for the first set of qualified doctors to come back.

This is why I've always been anti-Tory - because they're anti-NHS, anti-doctors and want privitisation. Your access to healthcare will be based on your ability to pay, just like with the other privitised industries. It's a good time to retire from medicine, and for those young enough, they can go into other courses, but it's a bad time for people like me who are in training and may or may not have a job for life at the end of it.

It is the same crass argument that is used to pile on tuition fees. I do not care about the extra taxes to give graduates free education because all it does is mean that there are plenty of doctors or lawyers or what ever available should I need them. Also without incurring huge debts they will not need such huge salaries to cover those student debts. That will mean that I do benefit should I ever go into hospital. This coalition are destroying the country with their neo-conservative/liberal agenda.

What would Labour have done? Thrown more money at it? They've done that for the past x years without the service improving. They've featherbedded the service so that there are layers of management who are accountable to no-one while those on the front line have to make do with what the bead-counters give them. The NHS should be led by the people at the sharp end, with the rest there to support them and provide what they need to do the job. After all, it's not a business, and while I'm not overawed by the current lot, at least they do appear to listen (sometimes).

I've just looked at the report from my local NHS Trust, and salaries and wages make up over 70% of the operating expenses, but they don't show how much is for front-line staff and how much is for management.

Here is my MP’s reply to an email I sent via 38degrees.com about this. It’s a standard fare reply, I think, and doesn’t address my concerns about private companies cherry picking services based on profitability, or the fact that private companies run for the benefit of the shareholders, not the customers (or in this case, the patients).






Simon Burns is a Health Minister, so his job is to talk this up as much as he can. I don’t trust him, or any of the Conservatives, on this at all. They love to privatise, and their agenda is to dismantle the NHS and give us the American system of health care.



Thing is, the government keeps on saying that a large number of GPs have signed up for this, implying that they are in agreement with it. This seems at odds with your observations, and indeed other prominent doctors. I’d like to know where these figures come from, and how they are able to be so freely massaged like this.

I believe the story is they take GPs who sign up as a 'representative sample' of the entire group of GPS who are available to sign up within a given health trust. So, say, there are 100 GPs in a health trust's area of administration and 8 of them sign up as wanting to take part in the scheme. According to the government's method, that means the health trust has signed up and therefore all 100 GPs can be considered 'in favour of the scheme'. So when they say '80% of GPS are in favour' what they actually mean is 'some indeterminate number of GPs in the health trusts that control 80% of GP's work have expressed a preference'.

This is obviously incredibly dodgy in all sorts of ways and anyone with two brain cells to rub together would tell you it's a completely spurious conclusion to come to. Although still not entirely definitive, the canvasing done by the GMC seems much more actually representative and can be neatly summarised as 'piss off'.

Jon

QuestionTime covered this issue last week.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010bbd2#p00g6nsw - Question 2

How can tell when a coalition spokesman is lying? Their lips move.

changed to reflect reality.

Bact to the OP when have the GMC or any of the medical colleges/unions ever welcomed reform. Didnt the GMC campaign against the setting up of the NHS?

Yes they did.

The GMC operate independently of doctors, despite us having to pay them.
The BMA is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard and most doctors aren't members.

Politicians have neutered the power of consultants so they are subservient to managers so they don't want to stick up.

Divide and conquer. The British way to destroy everything. Including the NHS!

reading between the lines on this i have come to the conclusion that when any Govt. try and cut management and bureaucracy within the NHS
the management and bureaucracy start shouting about cuts to frontline services

its the management and bureaucracy that then go and cut frontline services to safeguard their own jobs

the Govt. should just make sure 40% of management and 25% of the bureaucracy is compulsory cut over the next 4 years
this can be achieved by immediately sacking any management that cut any frontline services ...

One of the problems is that central government created so many targets and efficiency targets that they needed to create thousands of bureaucrats to get those figures. The government demands to be more business like have not stopped.