The homophobic discrimination in blood donation just got worse
contribution by Caroline Crampton
Several years ago one of my closest friends responded to my moaning about not being allowed to give blood (for health-related reasons) by saying that he couldn’t either. Not for tangible, provable medical reasons like me, but because he’s that lethal combination of homosexual and sexually active.
When I read in yesterday’s papers that public health minister Anne Milton is shortly to announce that this ludicrous ban on homosexual men giving blood is to be lifted, I was pleased that reason had finally come to the fore.
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Is it always better to be working than unemployed?
contribution by Richard Shrubb
An academic paper published recently suggests that a bad job is worse for overall health than no job at all. Is welfare policy going to result in worse mental health for the ‘spongers’ the tabloids refers to?
A 7 year analysis of government household studies in Australia suggests “employment policies with the premise that any job is better than none for economic and personal well-being may be misguided.”
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Has Cameron really u-turned on Lansley’s disastrous NHS bill?
contribution by Richard Blogger
The Sunday Telegraph reports that Cameron was ambushed by Tory MPs at last weeks 1922 backbenchers’ meeting where they expressed their concerns over the Health and Social Care Bill.
Since September I’ve been giving talks on the white paper and people have asked me how to stop the policy and I’ve told them that the only way is to target backbench (particularly shire) Tory MPs and carefully tell them what it will mean to their constituents.
Can the Lib Dems save the NHS?
Lib Dem conference recently passed a motion which urged substantial changes to the government’s plans for the NHS. I think it is fair to say that there are a relatively small number of people who think that this will lead to any substantial changes, given the record of the Lib Dems in government to date. But it seems to me that the chance of saving the NHS from the Tories is a massive political opportunity for the Lib Dems. continue reading… »
Why the coalition’s take on localism is unsustainable
Contribution by Rick Muir
This government wears localism as a badge of pride: it says that the days of ministers dictating local service targets from Whitehall are over, and that it wants to move to a world where more power is exercised at the local level.
But the form of localism being pushed by the coalition is full of tensions and inconsistencies. For a start, while some powers are being pushed down, others are being sucked back up into government departments. In health, the Government has abolished Strategic Health Authorities – but much of what they were previously doing is now being done directly by the Department of Health. In education, the expansion of academy schools means that more and more local schools are being funded directly by Michael Gove rather than by local authorities.
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Top official: NHS hospitals “could close” under reforms
Sue Slipman, the head of England’s leading hospitals, is warning the public in today’s Guardian that NHS hospitals may be forced to shut under the government’s proposed health reforms.
Other changes might include the following:
[Hospitals] will lose their accident and emergency or maternity units, and some will be downgraded to glorified health centres because of the government’s NHS shakeup.
Slipman is hardheaded about the possibility of a radical alteration in the provision of care in England, and tacitly seems to agree, in principle at least, with the reforms.
The NHS is not sustainable in its current form, including [its] supply of hospitals,” said Slipman. “If you want to retain a service that’s free at the point of delivery, it has to be the most efficient it can be and produce good quality. Whatever you think of these [Lansley's] reforms, you cannot be against reform if you want a sustainable NHS in the long-term. The reconfiguration of certain services is just the rational outcome of that change.
Although Slipman concedes that “This debate is the most difficult area [in healthcare],” her words will only add to the anxiety on the part of the public, and the growing anger among groups of activists like Keep Our NHS Public and UK Uncut .
A full list of the job losses and downsizing already underway in England’s hospitals can be found over at False Economy.
Could the BMA seriously disrupt Lansley’s plans for the NHS?
This morning the FT reports that Andrew Lansley has opened the door to further concessions on the NHS bill, as Libdem members “rejected his sweeping reform plans”.
Already a bad day for the UK health minister. Then at around 11.45am, 15 March, the British Medical Association (BMA) “voted to call upon Andrew Lansley to withdraw the bill” adding that “any willing provider will hurt the provision of healthcare in the NHS in favour of private industry“.
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Do Conservatives really think they can take on doctors… and win?
contribution by Neil Foster
The Conservative-led government is determined to improve support for its health proposals, amid fears it has failed to convince the public of the need for such drastic changes.
It is not a coincidence that more and more doctors are speaking out against their plans at the same time. The Government faces the steepest of uphill battles because it mistakenly thinks this is about ‘the message’. It’s not. It’s about motives and in particular the trust of the messengers.
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We need to stop the government privatising blood donations #bloodmoney
contribution by Neil Foster
Having spectacularly failed to sell off publicly owned forests, now the Government is attempting to open up our blood donation services to privatisation.
It will face enormous opposition from volunteer donors, health workers and society as a whole appalled at such a grisly prospect. Where you and I give blood to save lives, the privatisation junkies close to government sniff profit.
How Cameron’s Big Society 3.0 (corporate welfare edition) could be checked
The Big Society started off with the idea that people would run services for themselves. When it became clear that this wasn’t going to work, Big Society 2.0 was about promoting charities and social action.
When it became clear many of these “Big Society” charities were being wiped out by the cuts, and were very ungratefully complaining about government cuts, Big Society 3.0 was born.
But this is the worst idea of them all.
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Is the NHS really failing the elderly, as the ombudsman says?
contribution by Dr AlienfromZog
“The NHS is failing to treat elderly patients in England with care, dignity and respect,” said the health service ombudsman this week.
The report also claims that these are not isolated incidents and are in fact illustrative of the poor quality of basic care in the NHS. But there are simple reasons why these claims are unrepresentative.
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Why Cameron’s funding for the NHS will be worse than Thatcher’s
contribution by Richard blogger
The Conservative party went into the 2010 election with the slogan “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”.
Labour knew that it was not possible to do the former without doing the latter, and because they didn’t give a straight answer about how they would change NHS funding, they lost their traditional NHS electoral advantage.
But how do the spending committments, only now coming to light, match up?
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Are people with mental health problems being let down by representatives?
contribution by Richard Shrubb
“I have a dream…” said a great man, speaking of equal rights for the sons of slaves in his country. Joining in the fervour, another great man said “Say it out loud, I’m black and I’m proud”. Others in the same movement frightened the US government with talk of armed insurrection.
I had a dream. I dreamed of people seeing my education, skills, background and personality and a long way down the list, that I have mental health problems. So in 2005, fresh faced from university yet jaded already from discrimination because of a neurochemical imbalance in my brain, I joined a movement which I thought would change the minds of the public about mental illness.
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Is the NHS worse than healthcare in Europe, as Cameron claims?
contribution by Dr AlienfromZOG
Both David Cameron and Andrew Lansley have sought to justify the NHS reforms in various ways. In the Times today, Cameron says: “Already our health outcomes lag behind the best in Europe.”
Tories say that despite increased healthcare spending over the last ten years, the UK still has relative poor healthcare outcomes. But this is a case of the wrong diagnosis leading to the wrong prescription.
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BMJ ferociously attacks Tory NHS changes
The British Medical Journal is running an editorial this about NHS reform, called “Dr Lansley’s Monster”.
It is accompanied by a picture of Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Here are some passsages:
What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings? The politically correct answer has got to be: mad.
The scale of ambition should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world—the only one so large “that you can actually see it from space.” (More ominously, he added that one of the lessons of change management is that “most big change management systems fail.”)
Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, “The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.” To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded.
Like all the other structural reorganisations of the NHS, this one aims to improve health outcomes. What’s lacking is any coherent account of how these particular reforms will produce the desired effects, a point only underlined by the prime minister’s attempts to justify the reforms earlier this week.
On GP commissioning:
Whatever the eventual outcome, such radical reorganisations adversely affect service performance. As Kieran Walshe wrote, they are “a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS—to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time and effort. Even the earliest days of the transition have proved disruptive, with employees of the doomed primary care trusts and strategic health authorities choosing to jump ship rather than to go down with it.
With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of the survivors are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?
It ends:
Given their scale, securing these efficiency savings should take priority over the massive upheaval proposed in the new bill. For the time being, we agree with the King’s Fund that those GPs who are successfully involved in practice based commissioning should be given real rather than indicative budgets for some services and their performance monitored closely.
All other proposals should be kept on hold, pending an evaluation of whether this iteration of GP commissioning can bear the responsibility that the new bill seeks to place on it. If it turns out that it can, then the full introduction of the government’s ambitious health reforms will have been delayed a few years. If it can’t, then the country—and its government—will have got off lightly.
When what is essentially the official mouthpiece for British doctors is expressing this kind of alarm at government policy, it indicates that a dispositionally conservative body is very out of step with the present administration.
Which reinforces a point I’ve already made: that this is a government of radicals, led by some most unconservative Conservatives.
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Hat-tip to Stuart White
How the Tories unleased chaos in the NHS
I am a GP who has been involved in an evolving commissioning consortium (‘pathfinder’ no less), to try to make some sense of the government’s ‘reforms’. Although the Bill has just been released, since the bombshell was dropped with the White Paper in July people have been busy.
Most GPs in our area can be divided into two categories; those who think the plans are bonkers and don’t want to waste any time on it, and then those who think the plans are bonkers but want to limit the damage.
I belong to the second category continue reading… »
The French scandal that could come here thanks to NHS changes
contribution by David Nowell Smith
Those who are still unsure whether Andrew Lansley’s ‘bottom-up’ top-down reforms of the NHS are going to have disastrous consequences would be well advised to look to a scandal currently engulfing the French health service.
It centres around an anti-diabetes medicine called Mediator, which is believed to have caused between 500 and 2000 deaths (and over 30,000 hospitalisations) in its 33 years on the market (it was belatedly rescinded in November 2009).
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David Cameron on the NHS – in his own words
Following Cameron’s lovely foray onto BBC Radio 4′s today, in which he waxed lyrical about the NHS; I thought I’d share some choice quotes with you, dear reader:
I believe the creation of the NHS is one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. I always believed this.
David Cameron, 2006
Our PM was moved to utter the above during a party conference speech in 2006.
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How Labour should respond to the coming NHS crisis
contribution by Richard Blogger
The NHS financial crisis I outlined yesterday will be a terrible thing, but it could also be an opportunity for Labour.
For a start, it will finally convince the public that the Tories can never be trusted with the NHS: never again will a Tory leader be able to tell the British public “the NHS is safe with me”.
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Why 2011 will be the year the NHS will almost collapse
contribution by Richard Blogger
2011 will be the year that the NHS collapses and it needs explaining, briefly, why this will happen. So far, health secretary Andrew Lansley has been rather clever and rather dim.
Take the “dim” first.
The NHS is a very large organisation to run. It is particularly difficult to run when the money is short. Lansley has taken the attitude that he does not want to run it. He’s refused to pay any attention to the financial issues in the service.
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» The apparent acceptance of vandalism in anti-cuts groups harms us all
» The banking commission report doesn’t go far enough
» The homophobic discrimination in blood donation just got worse
» Why we need a public inquiry into the phone-hacking revelations
» What a new humanitarian foreign policy for Labour could look like
» Aren’t Labourites against the Alternative Vote being hypocritical?
» Is it always better to be working than unemployed?
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» Excellent: Ed Balls starts to back away from Eurozone bailouts
» Why austerity and deep cuts are a self-defeating measure
» Leaked document: How far does Nadine Dorries want to restriction abortion rights?
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