Some Thoughts On Conservative Health Plans.
Blog / January 27, 2010 / Comment now
I was recently contacted by the Socialist Health Association which caused me to devote some thought to the policies behind David Cameron’s general election campaign poster about the NHS. The basis of Conservative arguments to break up what they see as the state NHS monopoly justified by what seems on the face of it to be a laudable aim of giving more choice to patients is in reality fraught with danger
In reality most NHS patients are in no position to exercise any choice about where they need treatment. The older, sicker and poorer you are the less attractive choosing to travel further for treatment becomes. The reality is that ambulance drivers make more real choices than patients.
The Tories want to scrap Labour’s health targets. Having spent a number of years working in the NHS and serving on the management board of Sunderland City Hospitals I know from experience that in practice measuring and rewarding outcomes rather than activity although an excellent idea is very difficult to do.
The Tories say real budgets to be given to GPs will cut bureaucracy. To be fair we are blessed with some excellent primary health care professionals in the communities of Easington. Some G.P s are excellent at administration and some are not. Some would be good at running a budget but some would not. Under Conservative Health proposals each of the 8000 or so GP practices in England will have a budget of about £1 million, so presumably they would all have to employ managers to help them run their budgets. This plan would seem to suggest an awful lot of additional practice based managers to me.
The Tories propose that the NHS will be run by an independent board with the Secretary of State responsible for Public Health not the NHS. The Conservative strategy is designed to avoid any political accountability for health care. Although they also say they will “immediately stop the proposed closures of vital local services that are happening under this Government” market forces are likely to lead to the rapid closure of many smaller hospitals.
More worrying for those of us that live in deprived areas like East Durham they would alter the allocation of funding so it relates to need by which they mean the age of the population instead of poverty and deprivation when most GPs in more deprived areas like Easington are already struggling with historic under-funding.
Now add this policy to a really telling bit of investigative journalism into payments received by the Conservative Shadow Health Team from private medical firms reported in the Daily Mirror [25th Jan 2010 ~ Shadow Health Cash by James Lyons]. Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley took £21,000 from Care UK a company which is set to gain from Tory plans to increase private provision. Electoral Commission documents show Shadow Health Minister Stephen O’Brien’s office had three payments totalling £40,000 from Julian Schild. Mr O’Brien’s family also made a reported £184 million in 2006 by selling hospital bed makers Huntleigh Technology. Another Shadow Health Minister Mark Simmonds accepted a US trip to Boston worth £4512 from BUPA. The Tories Health Spokesman in the Lords is Lord McColl of Dulwich and he is a paid consultant to private health provider Endeavour Healthcare.
The Elvis Presley song …Suspicious Minds popped into my head for some reason. These links to private health go largely unreported in the quality and local press. I hope the British public will not be fooled by leopards that certainly have not changed their spots and could severely maul our beloved NHS if they get their paws on it.
