Second Life: National Health Service (UK): (Photo credit: rosefirerising)
This is an excellent, MUST READ article in the Telegraph. Check it out!
via Scandal of doctors paid more to do less – Telegraph.
The article cites latest evidence from the Public Accounts Committee, highlighting that hospital consultants‘ contracts with the public health authorities’ are ineffective, stopping consulting from working evenings and weekends; meanwhile, consultants have also been given exceptional bonuses routinely.
As John Gelmini indicated, in an earlier blog, it is time for radical action to save the NHS from meltdown. With regard to consultants’ contracts and their union, the BMA, John Gelmini argued:
The BMA contract should be renegotiated and if the BMA makes trouble they should be de-recognized and replaced with other doctors who are equally and better qualified than our own, expert systems and more “nurse practitioners” for simple ailments.
As the news about the state of UK public healthcare gets worse by the day, this repeated raises in my mind a series of open questions:
- Is the NHS too big to manage effectively?
- Are the vested interests like the BMA and the unions just too powerful in an austerity torn UK?
- Are the bureaucrats at the Department of Health ineffective, because of leadership, competence, motivation or available resources?
- Or is David Cameron’s Government just too weak, without the essential qualities to take on the vested interests, namely leadership, vision, and political stamina?
Personally, I think that it is too late for the NHS, and it should be replaced with a new model based upon Best Practice in other countries.
Any thoughts?
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Every day we get new reports of NHS mendacity and gross inefficiency which would not be tolerated anywhere else and since the Government’s is in charge, the buck stops with them, then the Department of Health and then the people supposedly leading the NHS.
Hospital consultants have, for years, been a law unto themselves, taking on private work and deliberately building up waiting lists in the NHS, and successive Governments have done nothing.
David Cameron has been in office for 3 years yet only now is the issue of this badly drafted, irresponsibly negotiated contract, come up and then only via MPs who are themselves, with few exceptions like my own MP Oliver Heald, an honourable and effective man, a group of money grabbing, property flipping, expense bludging, shysters who are soon to allow the system to award them a 15% basic pay increase.
The solution to the problem of consultants is to double their numbers through overseas recruitment and impose a revised contract.
Doctors need the same treatment plus an increase in numbers of nurse practitioners, the BMA and the Royal College of Surgeons to be de-recognized and a completely different contract imposed.
The best model to follow is the French system, coupled with German cancer treatments, and an intensive drive to get the public to learn to cook properly, and take responsibility for their own health via diet, exercise, the inculcation of strong and enabling personal philosophies, vitamin supplementation and less hedonistic lifestyles.
This should be buttressed by variable tax on foods, the promotion of conventional marriage/stable relationships and a policy of refusing to give major treatments for smokers, excessive drinkers and the morbidly obese until they have lost weight and taken sufficient remedial steps to improve treatment prospects.