Nurses for Reform Blog

I have an article published today on the Adam Smith Institute Blog.  Titled “The Micropolitics of Hospital Privatisation” it details the actions that NFR believes must be taken to improve UK healthcare provision. You can read the full text here.

I am pleased to confirm that earlier this week I had an interesting hour with Tory leader David Cameron in his private office in the House of Commons. I had been invited by him to discuss NFR’s ideas on the future of health policy and presented a range of ideas. Amongst others, these included the end of national collective pay bargaining for nurses and doctors, the view that the state should not own or have any of its agents manage hospitals, a world of widespread health advertising (to overcome problems of patient ignorance through trusted brands) and a dramatic liberalisation of hospital planning laws. On this latter point, central government should have no say in when and where any hospital is opened or closed. If he becomes Prime Minister I have no doubt NFR will meet with him and his policy team again. But whatever happens, he can rest assured that NFR will remain very much on the outside of his – and any other party political – tent. As a libertarian organisation, NFR has a profound mistrust of all politicians. As such, we will remain dangerous and continue to think the unthinkable.

Even the fiercest critic of the NHS would have thought that the system could manage to teach doctors to prescribe medicines safely.  Apparently not according to new research from the British Pharmacological Society.  This study has found that not only is the training so inadequate that medical students only fill in a hand full of prescriptions, but when they qualify up to 10% of the prescriptions that write are incorrect and potentially life threatening.  You really could not make this up!

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence known as NICE has yet again let down patients who desperately need medicines that will improve both quality and length of life.  This time it is women with the bone disease osteoporosis that have fallen foul of this Government agency’s dubious decision making process.

It is now becoming apparent to  British people, as it will to Americans as Comparative Effectiveness starts to withhold treatment, that NICE eventually turns NASTY – Not Available So Treat Yourself!