Nurses for Reform: Blog

This is an interesting story from the Sunday Times this week, reporting that the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche is considering not cooperating with NICE on cancer drug assessments.  This could have some serious implications for UK patients.

This story in todays Daily Mail is a sad indication of standards in NHS hospitals.

Another story of neglect by the NHS.  

This article describes damning evidence that despite all its rhetoric and billions of pounds of taxpayers money, this government and the NHS have increased the number of patients suffering from malnutrition as a direct result of an inpatient episode in an NHS hospital.

It was George Orwell who said “he who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

Having recently watched BBC 2’s ‘The NHS: A Difficult Beginning’ I was again reminded of Orwell. For the nation was again feed the laughably simplistic line that the National Health Service was the product of a few well meaning individuals and that its roots purely lay in the 1940s.

Failing to place the service in any historical, ideological or institutional context there was no mention of the medical profession coming under the nationalised monopoly authority of the state via the General Medical Council in 1858.

There was no mention of the British Medical Association’s campaign at the end of the nineteenth century to undermine consumer choice by stamping out competition amongst doctors through an act of Parliament that banned them from canvassing (advertising). 

There was no explication of the ideological push by the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb to first promote a nationalised healthcare system in 1909. 

Again, there was no mention of BMA’s push to part-nationalise healthcare through their explicit opposition to the self-help friendly society movement during the passage of the 1911 National Insurance Act. Having a deep hatred of working class consumer control, the BMA’s ‘medical gentlemen’ conspired with the middle class insurers to legislatively undermine the ever expanding working class Friendly Society Medical Institutes. Now forcing people pay National Insurance meant that millions of low paid workers could no longer afford the cover and protection of these institutions which they had built up over many decades and which they ultimately owned through mutuality.

No, to perpetuate the lie that the NHS did not represent an evolutionary expansion of the corporatist – anti-consumer – state, the BBC instead produced a film which simply argued that the service was the seemingly rootless product of one isolated statist: Nye Bevan.

Perhaps there should be no surprise here. For if you want to perpetuate the power structures of the past it makes far better television to suggest that a state institution was the creation of one so called working class hero than deal with the more challenging and complex issues of history and producer capture.

To help the NHS on its way at sixty it is far better to make it appear to be the revolutionary product of social liberation than the logical evolutionary extension of an ever expanding and grotesquely elite state. To go on with the lie that is the NHS it is vital that the past is heavily edited and censored.

This story reported in the Sunday Express is music to my ears.  Apparently, the government is looking to the private sector in the form of Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Healthcare to run the much promoted GP ployclinics.

The usual critics are already up in arms complaining that this should not happen and that all the private sector cares about are profits not patients.  They do not understand that to make profits and to be accountable to your shareholders you have to be concerned about your customers/patients and providing a good service.  Let me also point out that we do not live in a world where anyone could honestly say that the NHS is giving a good service to its patients.

I am sure that if Sir Richard Branson were to give 10% of the patients who enter his healthcare clinics infections or between 40 to 60% of them were to end up malnourished, his contract would be immediately terminated.  However, the NHS does this year on year and if the Wendy Savages of this world get their way will continue to do so.

Finally, far from criticizing this  initiative, Andrew Lansley and the Tories should be welcoming it with open arms and telling the public that the government is adopting conservative values and policies by embracing the market.

In a change from previous plans I now write a weekly column for the new Daily Telegraph Ways and Means blog.  Here is my lastest piece.

Over the weekend I contributed to  Independent Radio News (IRN) commenting on the Darzi report on the future of the NHS.

The broadcast went out to at least 250 independent radio stations.

I am pleased to announce that I have just had a column published on the Daily Telegraph Blog and will now be a monthly contributor to this site.

In an attempt to describe to American opinion formers and to the the American public the realities of the NHS I have recently participated in a project by the Centre for Medicine in the Public Interest.

Here is part of an interview I gave them earlier this year.