Doctors’ leaders have been charged with delivering a message of no confidence in government reforms to health chiefs.
“The profession is dismayed by the incoherence of current government policies and the damage it has caused to the NHS and the delivery of patient care.”
British Medical Association, 2006 (British Medical Journal)
There is strong anecdotal information from within the NHS which tells a consistent story for public health of poor morale, declining numbers and inadequate recruitment, and budgets being raided to solve financial deficits in the acute sector.
Professor Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer to the government, 2006 (parliament.uk)
The profession is dismayed by the incoherence of current government policies and the damage it has caused to the NHS and the delivery of patient care.
British Medical Association, 2006 (British Medical Journal)
The Tories weren’t destroying the NHS. They were trying to make it more efficient. You should have tried to improve it. I don’t think you understood the damaging consequences of your policies.
My report is four years too late. You should have commissioned this in 1997.
Your policies since then have made it [the NHS] worse.
Health is too complicated to use targets. Targets are naïve and blunt. They’re corrosive. You’re ignoring the human factor.
Derek Wanless, commissioned by the government to produce a NHS development plan in 2001 (Telegraph)
More than a third of NHS primary healthcare trusts, which fund hospitals in England, are running deficits that have led to a cutback in surgical operations and seen calls to close casualty departments, according to a joint study by the Guardian and the thinktank Civitas.
Although the government has said the health budget would not be cut, analysts say that even with “zero real growth” the NHS will face a shortfall of £20bn by 2013 – a gap that will grow to £38bn by 2016.
James Gubb, head of health policy at Civitas, said the tide of red ink was “of huge concern” given the tight budgets the NHS will be facing very soon.
“If financial control cannot be exercised in times of plenty, it does not bode well for times of famine,” he added. “With billions to effectively be cut from the NHS we are looking at huge productivity improvements to maintain today’s standards. Prudent organisations would be looking to set money aside to invest for such times.”
Doctors at the BMA’s (British Medical Association) annual meeting of representatives in Belfast have blamed the government for the financial crisis inthe NHS, saying that it has taken a record amount of money away from the care of patients and “squandered” it on unproved reforms.
It’s a result of [the] government’s own making - with relentless ideological reforms that have misappropriated billions away from patient care,” said a Middlesex GP and a member of the General Practitioners Committee of the BMA, Chaand Nagpaul.
“[It is] lamentable that this once in a lifetime investment opportunity is being squandered in front of our eyes, leaving the NHS with cuts in services and staff and unable to afford cancer treatments available in other countries,” he added.
He said that an estimated £1.5 billion had been spenton “perpetual reorganisation” within the NHS, £1 billion had been paid to private management consultants, such as those called in to help debt ridden NHS trusts, and £14 billion had been overspenton the NHS information technology programme.
