A Pause For Thought?

Cameron, Lansley et al, have announced their intention to have a 'natural pause' in the Bill to reform the NHS. A 'future forum' including that 'porcine' (honorary) Professor, Steve Field is being launched upon the country, to listen to the views of the NHS constituent about the changes that have been proposed (excuse me whilst I choke). Once this period, which coincides of course with the Easter Recess anyway (yes more holidays for the politicos), is over, the Bill will be sent to the Lords for perusal and possible modification.

The problem I have with the current and past reforms, is that they continue to concentrate on structure instead of quality, organisational change rather than the ethos and tenor of what universal health care should be. For far too long the NHS has stood for invasive and pernicious campaigns to to persuade us  (and now nudge us) into a new horizon of well being with moralistic and ill conceived measures about smoking, drinking, sex, and diet, indeed anything enjoyable. With social engineering at its heart, the anxieties of society are constantly addressed by campaigns to reduce cancer, heart disease and diabetes with little result other than a significant  elevation in the Nations blood pressure.

This has in turn led to poor quality health care, dispensed '9 to 5' (weekends and holidays excluded), in Hospitals and Surgeries, to a somewhat hostile patient cohort, who are now being appealed to by the NHS constituent, to 'save the NHS'. Those who have delivered this inferior and authoritarian 'we know best' standard of that which passes for Medicine, cannot really now expect the public to 'go to the barricades' and fight for them to keep their bureaucratic temples intact.

The NHS has presided over ever increasing levels of interventions into our lifestyles and behaviour, very few of which are founded upon any evidence or indeed have had any success. Doctors have become the 'health police' rather than the healer, and as they have distanced themselves from their patients they have prospered enormously in monetary terms, but lost credibility. They are now pawns in the Neo-Thatcherite construct started by Blair and continued by Cameron and his academy of 'toffs'. An NHS that has treated society with such contempt, despite its huge cost to that society deserves to founder.

I do not like the changes proposed very much. They amount to little more than a bureaucratic reshuffle; a movement of the deckchairs, because the fundamentals remain. But the opposition that has formed against it almost worries me more. If Allan Milburn, the BMA and the King's Fund  ( and David Owen for f***s sake) are against something then I'm afraid I will possibly have to review my position. In fact as the number of unprincipled and opportunistic politicians grows, who oppose this Bill, the more I become alarmed that I may have missed something! Hardly surprising in view of the number of pages it runs to (299 clauses!). Perhaps there may be some nugget of redemption in this pointless, needless and irrational Bill after all? Oh yes, the Quango's are going! But no, they are being systematically saved, if not by name then by transfer, such as the Food Standards Agency to the Dept of Health.

Doctors and the BMA never wanted an NHS, of that be certain. They wanted an elitist cohort of Physicians that dispensed wisdom and medicine to the 'proles' at a price that they set, not one set by some 'oik' in a Government Department who went to a ...Grammar School?  They persisted in this view until the Thatcher years, when Maggie offered them more power and control at the expense of a bureaucratic nightmare of invoicing procedures and budget management, when they decided that it was all too much, a bit like the 'poll tax'. Then along came Blair, all fired up to change the mindset and the BMA embraced him. All at once the BMA discovered it's desire to participate in Government sponsored (and guided) health care resulting in massive financial benefits to the membership and less hours! Well that was a surprise then?

Incentivised, at a level they could not have dreamed possible, most Doctors and Hospital Consultants doubled their pay, and reduced their involvement in patient care. 'Out of hours' was handed to private companies and A & E to trainees and locums (60% of all Hospital Doctors are locums).  The patient became the supplicant expecting little and rarely being disappointed. Many died, were maimed or at best received poor care and continue to do so. Yet the gravy train for Doctors, now irretrievably committed to peddling 'Big Pharma's' often substandard or even useless products, rolled on, with further and more intrusive protocols, even for the 'worried well', moving medicine further and further away from diagnosing and treating disease, to fruitless and dogmatic (usually wrong) prevention interventions that were founded in poor or even bad science.

At no point in this train of events was it thought necessary to involve the patient, save for 'patient, public involvement' rhetoric that only sought the views of an unrepresentative minority, of charities and professional middle class campaigners, with the time and money to be involved in the 'tea and biscuit' culture of meta-quango's, discussion forums and pointless conferences. Constantly harangued, largely ignored, the public in general wants little to do with the NHS or even their Doctor, now ensconced in expensive and shiny Health Centres, except when they are sick or fearful. Then they are treated to an endless list of questions, unrelated to the condition they have presented with, to ensure the practise fulfills the QOF protocol and a test regime more interested in their 'lipid profile' than their pain. Is it any wonder that as 'modern medicine' lurches toward wholly preventative measures, instead of treating "the poor and the lame, the sick and the dying" (1), that we are becoming more and more disenchanted with that which we are financing.

There now seems to be a further erosion of NHS principles, driven by privatisation of Primary Care that has more to do with dogma than need, the desire to furnish capitalism with further subsidy, and the utilisation of the latest 'mousetrap' from Pharma, whose greed continues to know no bounds. Older drugs, and medicines that were 'fit for purpose' before, keep falling off the end of the list, for no reason other than a desire to use the new and shiny one approved last week, irrespective of efficacy. Once in fact, all of those in the NHS have had their piece of the cake, there is little left for the actual patient, except indignity, poor care and nonsensical intrusion into their lives. And yet, are not all of these people there for one purpose and that purpose only, to pursue the practise of Medicine?

Change is in fact needed and drastic change at that. Justice for the harmed, together with Candour. Genuine scientific protocols to improve lives, not the treatment of symptoms for the enrichment of a pernicious industry that no longer is fit for purpose; 'Big Pharma'. A cessation of intrusive, patronising and ultimately fruitless endeavours to engineer social change, with fear. Medicine without the boundary of 'out of hours', peopled by real physicians, who actually know what they are doing. Yes let's have a real and vibrant 'Big Society' in the NHS that recognises its goals are set by its patients, not by its political masters and I include in these the BMA, the GMC and the bloody 'think tanks'. In fact I'd rather like to put a tank on their lawn, and see if I could get Niall Dickson, John Appleby and Penny Dash with just the one round. That would be fiscally responsible would it not?

So whilst you politicians are are all pondering, as to what cosmetic changes you can make to a Bill that is widely reviled, and the GP's squeal about how they will be able to cope with all the extra work, without some extra payment (again!), spare a thought for the poor sodding patient, because they're the reason we have an NHS. They aren't the one's that fucked it up, you are!

"Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age." 
(Albert Einstein) 


(1) Quotation courtesy of Morton Thompson - 'Not as a Stranger' C1954.