NHS Job Shop: “Working for Health” in Kentish Town. Closed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
An undercover investigation by the Telegraph highlights allegedly fraudulent practices at the NHS, the UK’s massive public healthcare organization.
via Video: NHS bosses paid by drug firms – Telegraph.
According to the Telegraph NHS bosses are being paid by drug firms to influence the choice of drugs.
This blog has been very critical of the management of the NHS over the last four years and has repeatedly argued that it is in a state of permanent decline with a cancer at its center. Politicians are not ready to hold the NHS and its many stakeholders properly to account – this is a weakness in UK politics as well as public healthcare.
Decisions about choice of drugs really matter, with the UK having one of the worst records in Europe for cancer outcomes in Europe.
Surely, the only way to weed out corruption at the NHS is to send the guilty to jail with long sentences and withhold pensions and severance pay for NHS employees who leave because of criminal practices?
Also surely drug companies who participate in corrupt practices must be punished by sending the guilty to jail and massive fines?
Thoughts?
Dr Alf's Blog 
So now we know that the NHS has alegedly corrupt officials and poor mortality and cancer treatment outcomes, as well, thanks to tireless investigative journalism by the Daily Telegraph in this article brought to us by Dr Alf.
It is time that the guilty men and woman were brought to book but doubtless the apologists in the Guardian and the BBC will say that this represents “a few bad apples”, is an invention of the “right wing press”, is “not representative of the NHS as a whole”, is an “exaggeration” of the true state of the NHS, that it ignores the “excellent work being done by hardworking nurses and doctors in the NHS”.
These siren voices need to be faced down and the malfeasance rooted out as the Government’s battle with the NHS and the medical profession becomes joined.
This time, we need no “blinking” on the part of either Jeremy Hunt, the Health Minister nor David Cameron, who is getting a little too relaxed by taking most of August off on holiday.
The opposition may well be in disarray and the Government may well have a “mandate” to reduce the deficit but this is the time to be relentless and put the enemies of progress and those who would defraud the public purse for gain to the sword.
That means pressing them hard, giving the corrupt no time to breathe, no time to regroup and no time to hide their misdeeds.
The bank accounts of those involved and all those around them need to be exposed and monies not accounted for recovered as would happen with a fraudulent benefit recipient.