Nurses for Reform Blog

Surely we are getting to the stage when the government has to realise that the NHS has had enough chances of survival in its current state. This report that has been launched over the weekend demonstrates that NHS Trusts are persistently failing their patients with fatal results.

It is time for the coalition government to act.  NHS provided care does not work.  All NHS hospitals must be returned to the independent sector.   The NHS can then be a funding organisation that contracts with these hospitals and if treatment and care is not provided to acceptable standards then contracts must be removed and failing hospitals allowed to be closed or taken over by more successful trusts.

This is the only way forward for state funded healthcare in the UK and the sooner that the government acts to stop the rot in this failing system the better.

It is with great sadness that I have learned of the recent death of Nurses for Reform Advisory Board Member Robert McIndoe.

Robert was a Registered Mental Nurse (RMN) who was a great source of advice and support when NFR was established, he was also one of our first authors.

He leaves his lovely wife Shirley and daughters Maddy and Issy.  His company, wise council and support will be greatly missed.

This is a shocking but unfortunately not surprising report about the way in which the UKs elderly population are being failed by the NHS.

Our elderly generation is the one that was promised all healthcare from Cradle to Grave, and it is certainly having its journey to the latter hastened in appalling circumstances.

What is truly awful though is the lack of upset that this story has caused. No government ministers have been calling for enquiries or promising to get to the bottom of this. Andrew Lansley, the Secretary of State for Health, has made no comment that I can find, this story has been allowed to die and the UKs elderly population will continue to pay the price of a National Health Service that is not fit for purpose and that requires urgent and radical reform.

I have a chapter on Comparative Effectiveness in this this new publication by the Hoover Institution.  In it I discuss the problems faced by Western Europe from government led Health Technology Assessment  describing lessons learned from such institutions as NICE in the UK that has denied women with breast cancer Herceptin, people with Altzheimer’s disease Aricept and MS patients Beta Interferon to name but a few.

I suggest the following three courses of for America;

America should reject the statutory creation of any organization that seeks to centralize government control of patient access to drugs, devices, medical technologies, treatments or procedures.

Comparative Effectiveness research in healthcare and health technology assessments should be undertaken only by the private sector and not governmental bodies.

Comparative Effectiveness research should be patient-centered and supportive of quality and value, not focused simply on cost-containment.  In this respect, it should promote scientific advances, health information technology, and the emerging science of personalized medicine.

I conclude;

As is clear from the British experience and other example from Western Europe, a comparative effectiveness strategy that relies on central planing and coercion will not only be counterproductive in the long run – because it will undermine the incentives for medical innovation – but it will also lead to the imposition of cost constraints that will worsen patients’ medical conditions and damage the quality of their lives.

This story is great news for the UKs education system.  For me it also bodes very well for other state services, including the NHS.  With the government prepared to allow good schools to expand and failing  ones to decline and close, or to be taken over by the successful organisations, the next logical step would be to allow the same process to be applied to healthcare and hospitals.

It is also the view of Nurses for Reform that this is a historic opportunity for the failing institutions to be taken over by the independent sector.  It would be great to see failing hospitals regenerated and run as not-for-profit mutuals that would truly benefit the local communities.