A Hard Look at UK Hospital Consultants – a Law unto Themselves

Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, showing Dance’s portico (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

In this article, I am responding specifically to Dr Alf’s re-blogging of the Telegraph article entitled “Scandal of doctors paid more to do less – Telegraph. “However, the reader may also want to refer to my earlier blog entitled “A Hard Look at How to Reform the UK’s NHS Effectively.”

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 three 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 honorable 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.