Yet again the Medical profession has the Government where it hurts! To meet the key objective of getting a high proportion of the UK population vaccinated against pandemic (swine) flu, the Department of Health is having to pay off the General Practitioners
This is no different to the 1948 battle to establish the National Health Service. When the medical profession in the shape of the British Medical Association (BMA) threatened to derail the process, the then Health Minister Aneurin Bevan claimed that to get the doctors on side he had had to “stuff their mouths with gold”
NFR believes that it is time that the medical profession stopped holding their patients to ransom and using the NHS to broker these special payments for work. The time has come for doctors to be truly independent and for them to bid in a competitive market for work such as this. While the government remains the sole funder of the vaccination programme’s and indeed most other healthcare, it must stop being blackmailed by the medical profession and open up all healthcare provision to competitive tender, therefore getting a much better deal for the taxpayer.
