Wendy Savage writes at OpenDemocracy.

Dr. Evan Harris warns of continuing NHS issues to Liberal Democrat activists at the Social Liberal Forum (SLF) conference “Liberalism, Equality and the State”.

Andrew Lansley writes in the Independent suggesting that the NHS is not successful and needs reform. How on Earth do the proposed ‘reforms’ put “patients are at the centre of every decision”? It’s bollocks.

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

Saving the NHS: the fight goes on | openDemocracy

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I believed the listening exercise was a PR response to the growing chorus of dissent and outrage about the Bill -over 400,000 signatures collected by 38 degrees, the BMA’s and the RCN’s opposition, the TUC march with thousands demonstrating their anger about the cuts in a peaceful and good natured way with NHS banners prominent, and local marches, demonstrations and pickets cannot be ignored and have impinged on Cameron. Clegg, after signing of the White Paper and the Bill (apparently, according to Lib Dem health spokesman John Pugh, without having read them), was forced to respond to the demands of his own party led by Baroness Shirley Williams and Dr Evan Harris in March. The result of the May elections made him really try to get some changes but the LibDems are no match for the wily Tory politicians.

The Future Forum, billed as independent experts, were selected by whom? The listening events were aimed at the voluntary sector and ordinary people could not get to them except when the Guardian had one where Steve Field was 75 minutes late having been held up in his taxi after talking to David Cameron in Ealing. I managed to get to the London one in Islington and the whole room was skeptical about the Bill and these changes will not reassure the public. The poll commissioned by ITN showed that 49% of people do not think they can trust the Conservatives on health and half of the rest did not know what to think.

Lansley said after 99% of nurses at their conference passed a vote of no confidence in him ‘I am sorry if what I am setting out to do has not communicated itself” as if he had not been speaking all over the country to Radio and TV programmes and newspapers backed by a team of numerous press officers. But I think the absence of confidence is because he has not told us the truth about what his plans aim to achieve which is turn the NHS into a commercial market. We the English people do not want this and we must badger our MPs of all parties until they get the message.

NHS reforms hide ‘new threats’, warns leading Lib Dem | Society | The Guardian

A leading Liberal Democrat has warned there are “new threats” hidden within the reworked NHS plans that have been drawn up for the coalition.

The former MP Dr Evan Harris, who led the first Lib Dem rebellion which forced the government to “pause” its reforms and think again, has told the Guardian he can’t rule out another Lib Dem rebellion if the coalition doesn’t move to ameliorate three new problems in its proposals.

Harris has concerns regarding competition, commissioning of private firms, and the level of responsibility for the NHS held by the health secretary.
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Andrew Lansley: It’s been difficult, but the NHS will be better for it – Commentators, Opinion – The Independent

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I am determined to see these plans through to secure a sustainable health service for generations to come. This process has at times been difficult – modernising an organisation as large as the NHS always is – but this is what I am in politics to achieve.

Now it is time to move forward. I think, in years to come, people will see this as a key moment – when, with the guidance of medical experts, we put the NHS on the road to success.

 

27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

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NHS news is concerned with various responses to changes signalled by the government’s acceptance of Future Forum recommendations.

 

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

York GP hits out over NHS changes (From York Press)

THE York GP leading a campaign against sweeping Government health reforms says the recent listening exercise on the controversial changes was “a shambles”.

Earlier this week, David Cameron announced a Government U-turn on several of its key NHS reforms, following recommendations by a panel of experts.

Dr James Chan, who works at York Hospital, and heads the Save Our NHS York campaign and website, said: “Although we welcome many of the outcomes, it stops short of looking at the hard scientific evidence out there which says that competition doesn’t drive up quality.

“The largest costs to the NHS are not looked at. Medicines and equipment which are run by the private sector are costing us more and more for little benefit for patients.

“This drains away our tax money to big companies who make sickening profits, at the detriment to the rest of the health service.

“This is what private involvement means – greater cost, less benefit, more profits for shareholders while patient services get cut.”
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Unison vows to kill Tory Franken-Bill / Britain / Home – Morning Star

Health union Unison urged total destruction of the government’s “Frankenstein Bill” for privatisation of the NHS today.

Tricky Prime Minister David Cameron relaunched his pet project with some new parts, but unions and health campaigners issued grave warnings of the havoc which he still intends to unleash.

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said: “The government is creating a monster and the NHS is the victim.

“The Bill will pave the way for private companies to grab any part of the NHS where they think they can turn a profit.

“Once the NHS is opened up to competition, it becomes subject to European Competition laws and there is no turning back.”

Mr Prentis warned: “The government is creating a Frankenstein Bill that should be thrown out now.”

Health union Unite predicted that private healthcare companies would now use EU law to transform their toehold in the NHS into a headlock.
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The verdict on the NHS bill shakeup: Experts react to the changes | Society | The Guardian

GPs

Dr Clare Gerada, chair of the Royal College of GPs, is pleased ministers have performed what she calls “a monumental U-turn” and says “the prime minister is heading in the right direction”. But she wants to see the exact wording of the amendments to the health and social care bill to ensure it does follow through on Cameron’s pledges to honour all 16 recommendations of Steve Field’s NHS Future Forum report.

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NHS managers

The 40,000 managers in the NHS are pleased that Professor Steve Field forcibly urged ministers to stop denigrating them as pen-pushers and bureaucrats, which he said had prompted some managers to quit the service just when their expertise is needed to help it through the coming upheaval.

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Hospital doctors

The abandonment of Andrew Lansley’s original plan for the regulator to promote competition between hospitals pleased the Royal College of Physicians, which represents hospital doctors.

It now wants to help the NHS Commissioning Board and Monitor to develop guidance on how choice and competition can be applied on the ground in hospitals, GPs surgeries and elsewhere.

But Sir Richard Thompson, the college’s president also warned that “without fundamental review the government’s current proposals for reforming medical education and training will put the next generation of doctors’ training at risk and could jeopardise patient safety.”

The mandatory inclusion of a specialist hospital doctor on the board of each clinical commissioning group is a significant success for the college. It is suggesting that, as a reciprocal gesture, a local GPs’ representative could sit on the board of every local hospital.

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Nurses

The Royal College of Nursing, which represents the UK’s 400,000 nurses, scored a victory by ensuring that “at least one registered nurse” will be on the board of each new clinical commissioning group, rather than just local GPs.

“Nurses have an unparalleled range of skills and experience to enable them to improve healthcare at every level [and can] help build a service which can manage long-term conditions, keep people out of hospital and improve the health of the public”, said RCN chief executive Dr Peter Carter.

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Private and not-for-profit healthcare firms

David Cameron’s explicit rejection of further private sector involvement in the NHS has appeased the Bill’s many critics and helped neutralise its most sensitive issue. But it has left both private and not-for-profit providers of healthcare frustrated and warning that the NHS will be poorer if they are squeezed out.

“The independent sector continues to believe that the NHS needs more innovation, diversity and robust, fair competition if it is to meet the challenges it faces, including achieving better integration, which we support and which can be strengthened by a competitive market”, said David Worskett, director of the NHS Partners Network, which represents both sectors.

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Health policy experts

Professor Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund health think-tank and a member of the Downing Street health ‘kitchen cabinet’, sees the updated reforms as “a more promising approach to meeting the health challenges of the future than the proposals originally set out in the Health and Social Care Bill.”

But he warned that: “The confirmation of the Prime Minister’s pledge to keep waiting times low, and the emphasis placed on the 18-week maximum wait for hospital treatment enshrined in the NHS Constitution, leaves the NHS with a very significant challenge. With the spending squeeze beginning to bite, the number of hospital inpatients waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment is already at its highest level for more than three years and waiting times for A&E and diagnostic services have also risen. As the government has said that it is opposed to targets, it now needs to be clear about how this pledge will be measured and enforced.”

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Mixed reception for NHS climbdown – Health News, Health & Families – The Independent

Conservative and Liberal Democrats presented a united front yesterday as the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, detailed the Government’s reformed NHS reforms amid jeers and heckles from Labour benches.

The proposals could still face opposition from doctors, represented by the British Medical Association, who warned that the Government had not addressed their concerns about GPs being given financial incentives to save the NHS money. Others expressed concern that safeguards put in place could result in additional layers of the bureaucracy the reforms were designed to address.

Labour accused Mr Lansley of wasting £800m in redundancy payments for health staff, many of whom will be re-employed in their old roles. “This is a political fix, not a proper plan for improving care for patients, or for a better or more efficient NHS which is able to meet the big challenges it must face for the future,” said John Healey, the shadow Health Secretary.
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The National Wealth Service – Health News, Health & Families – The Independent

As Coalition retreats on NHS reform, investigation reveals conflicts of interest that could give GPs a licence to print money

By Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor and Emma Slater

One in seven doctors appointed to the new clinical commissioning boards, which will have responsibility for spending £60bn of NHS money every year, could have a significant financial conflict of interest, an investigation has found.

Research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that, of the first 52 consortiums established under the Coalition’s NHS reforms, 19 could present concerns about the independence of their boards. The study raises the prospect that GPs could benefit directly from private companies working in the NHS.
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27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

dizzy

The ‘Future Forum’ chaired by Steve Field reported on the ‘listening exercise’ on NHS reform yesterday. As expected, many changes were recommended to the Destroy the NHS bill. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is expected to respond to the NHS Future Forum in a statement to Parliament at 3.30 this afternoon.

Unions Unison and Unite continue to oppose the bill and call for it to be abandoned in its entirety.

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

NHS reform plan needs ‘substantial change’ – Channel 4 News

The NHS Future Forum, set up to make recommendations on changes the health service reforms, said today there had been serious concerns voiced by staff, patients and the public.

For two months, the forum has spoken to thousands of interested parties and tens of thousands have emailed or posted their views in a “listening exercise” set up by the Government in the face of widespread criticism of its plans for NHS reform.

Their key recommendations include:

• Slowing the pace of change so reforms come in only when and where the NHS is ready.

• Keeping the Health Secretary ultimately accountable for the NHS. The plan had been to devolve power and responsibility to an independent NHS Board.

• Nurses, specialists and other clinicians should be involved in deciding which health care to buy, not just GPs as was originally proposed.

• Competition should be used to improve quality of care not to just drive down prices.

• The role of the regulator Monitor should not be to “promote” competition but to “support choice, collaboration and integration” – that is making sure all parts of the NHS work together to improve care for the patient.

• All parts of the NHS should be subject to more accountability and public openness.
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NHS bill: concession or sleight of hand? | Society | The Guardian

Are Steve Field’s recommendations for the government enough to assuage the doubters that have blocked Andrew Lansley’s flagship bill? If the government were to accept everything then probably yes.

The point of the good doctor’s eight-week listening exercise was about “pimping a policy” – that is taking a clapped out vehicle and slapping on enough paint and chrome to make it not just acceptable to the general public but desirable.

This may not be a good thing. In repackaging the reforms Field may have conceded too much ground to opponents – and blunted the bill so much that it is a pointless mess.

Just look at the attempts to sell GP commissioning. Field says GPs should be joined by hospital doctors and nurses to commission care, and they shouldn’t be forced to band together by 2013 into consortiums.

But this means a mucky bureaucracy springing up around at least five different bodies able to buy care for patients. Lansley had hoped to only have GP commissioners in two years’ time, because otherwise you’d have a two-tier health service emerging just when budgets were being slashed. So to buy off doctors and nurses today, the government lays the ground for tomorrow’s political crisis.
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Craig Murray » Blog Archive » Cheap Medicine and Nasty

There is a coalition lovefest going on over the new reformed NHS reforms, which have suddenly gone from being the worst think since the plague to the greatest thing since sliced bread, all with a few tweaks.

The problem is, it is the entire principle on which the reforms are based, not the mechanisms operating on that principle, which is fundamentally wrong. The underlying principle is that the NHS will work better if it operates on competition between healthcare providers, both existing NHS hospitals and clinics, and private and charitable hospitals and clinics which will have new access to NHS patients and cash.

Both Sky and the BBC have been telling us all day that competition drives up efficiency and quality.

But this is not true. If financial profit is the motive, then competition does indeed increase efficiency, in terms of maximising profit by minimising costs. But the natural tendency is for this to be at the expense of quality, except in certain specific areas of luxury good provision. Competition and profit drives the producer to give just as much quality as required to provide something the consumer will still take, while undercutting rival sellers. Where there are a limited number of providers, (and in most parts of the country there are obvious limits to the number of possible clinics and hospitals), this increasingly becomes a race to the bottom in quality, with the added temptaitons of cartelisation on price.

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Review still leaves NHS open to dangers of competition | The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy

The NHS Future Forum has acknowledged that the real fears of patients and health professionals about the proposed NHS reforms were in many instances totally justified, says the CSP.

Reacting to the publication today by the forum of its consultation, chief executive Phil Gray said: ‘While we welcome some of the recommendations in Professor Field’s report, the CSP remains deeply concerned at the continued emphasis on increasing competition and a diversity of providers in the NHS, which physiotherapists believe will fragment patient care and lead to rationing. Increasing evidence is emerging of rationing on the basis of cost as opposed to clinical need.

The CSP was ‘very disappointed’ that – apart from the recommended changes to Monitor’s role – the forum’s proposals increase the potential for Any Qualified Provider policy.

Mr Gray said: ‘We believe this can only have a negative impact on patient care. We are receiving worrying reports from physiotherapists working under an AQP model who are concerned about severe rationing of their services leading to poorer patient outcomes.’

The CSP urges the government to halt the roll out of the AQP until the further work recommended by the NHS Future Forum on choice and competition and the risks of “cherry-picking” is complete.

Newswire Article: BMA response to the NHS Future Forum recommendations on NHS health reforms 13/06/2011

Responding to the NHS Future Forum’s recommendations to the government on NHS reform in England, Dr Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of BMA Council, said:

“The way the government and the Future Forum have engaged with the profession during this listening exercise has been a refreshing experience. It is vital that this constructive approach is maintained in the following months as the detail is worked on.

“The Future Forum’s recommendations address many of the BMA’s key concerns, to a greater or lesser extent. We are hopeful that our ‘missing’ concerns, such as the excessive power of the NHS Commissioning Board over consortia and the so called ‘quality premium’ will be addressed as more detail emerges. While we welcome the acknowledgement that the education and training reforms need much more thinking through, there needs to be immediate action to prevent the imminent implosion of deaneries.

“Obviously, the critical factor is now how the government responds, as well as ensuring that the detail of the changes matches up to expectations. But if the government does accept the recommendations we have heard today we will be seeing, at the least, a dramatically different Health and Social Care Bill and one that would get us onto a much better track. There will then still be plenty more to do to ensure that the amended reforms do support the NHS and its staff in continuing to improve care for patients and tackle the major financial challenges ahead.”

NHS privatisation ‘still on track’ – Health News, Health & Families – The Independent

Health experts welcomed today’s report but unions said the “NHS privatisation programme is still on track”.

Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund, said the recommendations would “significantly improve” the Health and Social Care Bill.

“The emphasis on integration is particularly significant and addresses a key weakness in the Government’s original proposals.

“The ‘pause’ has served the NHS, its staff and patients well by allowing time to reflect on how to deliver the reforms the health system needs. But it is now time to move on.

“The Government must now move quickly to endorse today’s report, put an end to the disagreements that have dominated recent months and provide the direction and stability the NHS desperately needs to navigate the challenging times ahead.

“Despite the headlines generated by the reforms, the key priority facing the NHS remains the need to find up to £20 billion in productivity improvements to maintain quality and avoid significant cuts in services.

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Unite national officer for health, Rachael Maskell said the Bill should be scrapped.

She added: “The problem with Monitor is that it will now promote choice, competition and collaboration – all of which are contradictory aims.

“The hybrid mess that Monitor will become will do to the NHS what other botched regulatory bodies have done to other public services – from rail to social care.

“Unless patient care comes first, then Monitor will fail patients – and our politicians will have failed them too.”

She added: “”The way that David Cameron and Health Secretary Andrew Lansley will interpret the Future Forum’s recommendations is that the pace of the privatisation of the NHS will be slowed down, but not abandoned – that’s the crux.”

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, said: “Really big questions over critical issues such as privatisation remain unanswered: just how will the Government prevent “cherry-picking”?

“And why are there no limits on the amount and range of services that can be privatised?

“The Forum is recommending sweeping changes to the Bill because it is riddled with flaws.

“It exposes the real agenda behind the Government’s Bill – the wholesale marketisation of the NHS.

“It wants to turn our health service into nothing more than a logo on the side of a van run by a multinational company.”
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‘NHS privatisation train has not been derailed by Future Forum report’, says Unite

The NHS privatisation programme is still on track despite protests by health professionals to the Future Forum ‘listening’ exercise, Unite, the largest union in the country, said today (Monday 13 June).

Unite, which has 100,000 members in the health service, said that the NHS had been through an unprecedented year of uncertainty – but the report of the Future Forum, unveiled today, will do nothing to quell the concern of health professionals and patients.

It has been a wasted year that has caused havoc with the NHS which had just received its best patient satisfaction survey for a generation.

Unite said that the Future Forum had done some good work in exposing the flaws in the controversial Health and Social Care bill, but the pace of privatisation had only been slowed, not discarded – which will not meet the concerns expressed by the Liberal Democrats at their spring conference.
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27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

dizzy