Nurses for Reform Blog

Something that has really annoyed me during the debate about the forthcoming UK healthcare reforms is that when there is talk about the independent sector providing care for NHS funded patients, the independent sector is accused of cherry picking.  It is stated that the nice, clean and profitable work will be chosen leaving the NHS to pick up the more expensive, difficult and less popular work.

Well, I think it is time to be honest about this and in my opinion no healthcare organisation cherry picks like the NHS does.  When the NHS was established in the 1940s end of life hospice care was left out of the nationalisation as the NHS did not want to be involved in this expensive and unpopular work that ended in all of the patients dying.  The happy result of this is that without state interference the UK has a thriving, high quality hospice movement.

As time moves on and the NHS cannot afford to carry on as it has in the past, the cherry picking continues with NICE deciding what drugs the NHS will and will not give people, with infertility care rarely funded by the NHS, with much mental health and elderly care provided by the independent sector, with more and more surgical procedures being classed as cosmetic rather than plastic surgery so that the NHS can wiggle out of providing the, and even less dental procedures being available to NHS patients.

This is all very different to that founding promise of the NHS that all Medical, Dental and Nursing care would be free to everyone, rich or poor!

This morning I was interviewed on LBC Radio with a GP from the BMA discussing the speech that David Cameron’s made yesterday on the NHS Reforms.

I made several points;

First, David Cameron talked about keeping the values and ethos of the NHS and these reforms are true to that promise as they do not falter from the founding promise that the NHS will be free at the point of use.

Second, David Cameron stated yesterday that these reforms are little new and as such they are an evolution not a revolution.   They follow on from the work of Tony Blair’s labour government.  Indeed, it was under Labour that from 2000 onwards NHS funded patients could receive surgery, treatment and critical care in the independent sector with 250,000 NHS patients per year entering independent sector hospitals.

Finally, the GP stated that healthcare is not like the high street, that bad hospitals cannot be closed down like bad shops.  Well, I would argue that they should be.  NFR wants to see failing hospitals taken over by successful organisations or social entrepreneurs so that we no longer hear stories of the elderly dying for lack of water in UK hospitals.

This letter today in The Daily Telegraph is a great move forward from the medical profession in support of Andrew Lansley’s NHS Reforms.

Not only do the GPs support the reforms but they point out the most important part of them, the benefits to the patients.  For Nurses for Reform this is the most important reason for the reforms.  That patients can work together with their family doctors to chose how and where their healthcare is delivered.

Another article in the Telegraph questions that the GP’s letter does not mention the use of the private sector for healthcare provision.  Could this possibly be because GPs and patients do not mind who owns the hospital in which their care is delivered?  What is important to them is that the care they receive is good quality, value for money and that they do not contract healthcare associated infections or become malnourished during their hospital stay.

Matt James, the Chief Executive of the private hospitals campaign group ‘H5’  recently got it right when commenting on the government’s Health Bill he accused trade unions of having falsely “whipped up accusations of privatisation”

NFR has long argued that the government’s Health Bill does not go far enough. So long as trust hospitals remain in the public sector and are not privatized there cannot by definition be sufficient independence or genuine market driven competition. That is why NFR believes in universal independent provision and wants full-blown hospital privatisation.

If only the trade unions were right. If only H5 would openly campaign for more privatisation!

Putting to one side the dire financial situation this country is in, I do still find it amazing that despite continued evidence that the NHS is failing the British people the trade unions continue to bury their heads in the sand.  While the rest of us, our family and friends are finding out on a daily basis that the NHS cannot and will not live up to the promises of the 1940s the unions are now threatening to make matters worse by going on strike.

What also interests me is that  for all their complaining and protesting I cannot find any evidence that Unison can suggest alternative ways of reforming the NHS.  They go on and on about fairness and equality but there is not one jot of a suggestion of how they would do things.   Maybe Dave Prentis knows the way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that will solve all our problems, but in the real world the truth is that it will continue to be the elderly and the most vulnerable in society that suffer from the strike action proposed by Mr Prentis and his members.