NHS reforms- anyone else as disbelieving as I am?

[nowwearefour]

What on earth is going on here? Privatisation by stealth? I know what- let's take the focus off the patients and the healthcare and put it on re-organising ourselves.AGAIN. how brilliant. anyone care to help me see what the benefits are of this?

Just as an aside, in private healthcare professionals who are qualified and accredited tend to get rigorously checked and higher paid, more so than the NHS which as far as I can see is so bound by protocol that they often underuse qualified staff for fear of something bad happening.

But - private healthcare seems to buy in cheap 'bulk' employees such as nurses and healthcae assistants, so I would want to know that training in other countries was to UK standards and that we would maintain those standards.

My guess is, in the short term, those left within the PCTs will get taken up by GPs. GPs will get paid more for doing this, so it will not save the taxpayer at all

The GPs haven't got time or the skills to do commissioning - they will get together into consortia and put the management of the consortia out to tender and it will be private companies who will do it. They will be expected to keep their share holders happy. The health of the local people will not be their primary aim.

But, maybe Cameron's 'Big Society' idea will come to the fore and we will all do it for our local GPs for free!!!

Cameron even has the brass neck to market the reforms as an example of the Big Society -- it is a decentralisation that shifts power from state to communities (ha ha ha ha ha) so government will engineer it but will take no responsibility for the outcomes of the changes, because the nature of the change, according to the propaganda, is to free up society to take its own decisions.

Also, the NHS provides an overarching view of healthcare in the UK. It is comprehensive and strategically planned, funded and managed.

Once GPs pay for 'bits and pieces' in their local area that overview disappears and it will be a piecemeal effect.

Services will start to disappear. They already are.

I worked for the nhs. i like many of my collegues have been tendered out. we are the lucky/unlucky ones.... others are loosing their jobs... This slow privatisation of the nhs breaks my heart...
Yes there is need for change, but not on such a scale. my new employer has me filling in 5 plus questionaires with every contact i have with a patient... this is to show efficiency, for national data analysis. This is on top of my notes (paper and computer), letters not generated by computer etc etc... i would be more efficient spending my time on patient care, not point scoring paperwork.... unfortunatly this seems to be forgotten. Its not about providing a service based on local need anymore, regardless what is said... its all about being cheap and not necessarily face to face. its all very sad.

Mumtoallgirls your service sounds like mine, bet we work in similar fields (mental health???)

I am still NHS but funded by PCT so funding will have to come from somewhere - GPs like our service but have already said they don't want to pay for it

It makes me so angry that the government is using the deficit as an excuse to push through changes that are completely ideological.

The Tories don't believe in the NHS, they never have and never will. It was a Labour principle from the start and this government is going to plough ahead in dismantling it without any consultation, when GP, NHS workers and the general public are all saying we don't want this!!

The NHS is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern Britain and it belongs to us all.

How dare DC destroy it.

TigerseyeMum- certainly is mental health. Our GP's want our service but demand out weighs man power and the paper work is slowing us down... its not about treatment anymore. We on the ground can see this car crash happening but no one listens. The phrase that springs to mind is 'the computer says'!

What's incredible is that this is being proposed by a coalition government.

This sort of deeply unpopular, fundamental change would normally be attempted only by a govt with an overwhelming majority.

The Lib Dems could pull the plug on this tomorrow - if they wanted to. I wonder if we're going to see increasing back bench rebellions?

Oh we say Computer says all the time and we also call ourselves the Battery Hens

I have never seen so much paper and ticky boxes, however it was the Labour government who pushed it through so I can't blame Cameron for that one

Mind you it's all part of the cutting back culture which is set to continue.

Incidentally, our service used to be provided by a well-known private mental health provider but there was not enough money in it so they pulled out.....

Hls I meant to work in nhs you have to have hpc registration but outside there is not that legal obligation unless you want to use a protected title. Hammer I have raised the issue several times in the last 6months with my manager and commissioners when I believed standards were being sacrificed for finances and was told I was being inflexible, obstructive and uncooperative. I have worked in nhs for 17years and have never seen it as bad as this if people were mad about the student fees raises they should be apoplectic about this issue

I don't think these reforms will make the NHS any better then it currently is. The biggest problem with the NHS is the NHS itself, it is a deeply flawed concept and will never deliver services to the standard of other European counterparts. I really think its time it was scrapped and we looked at introducing an insurance type system similar to the ones used in France and Germany.

Hammerlikedaisies - yes this is the government's plan - keep saying the NHS is broken, and we will believe it.

We shouldn't let the government get away with this - they have no mandate.

Everyone email your MP,and send the link to all your friends - its really that easy to show them how strongly we feel. A lot of MPs are quite worried about the consequences of the reforms. Some of them think Lansley has gone way beyond reasonable, and they are worried rising waiting lists and falling standards will be blamed on them. If we put enough pressure on, they may vote against the reforms.

I have talked with a random selection of three GPs about this. They all think it's barking. How can it be pushed through when the GPs don't want it? That's a mystery to me.

The big issue with the cutbacks as well is that people will focus on frontline delivery, and not on training. It's easy to cut training, as that doesn't cause problems for a few years. But when it does, boy will it cause problems. Not to put it too finely, the folk I speak to in universities consider that we'll all be fucked in a few years time. Especially with the likely changes in global flows of staff, with Obamacare, and developing countries hanging onto more of their healthcare staff instead of losing them to Europe and the US.

domestic - good point re. training.

I interviewed a GP who is leading one of the consortia. He said GPs are reluctantly going along with it because they have no choice - PCTs are being abolished, they are already losing staff, the change is happening whether they like it or not. He admitted he doesn't yet know whether it will work or be a disaster.

If the government actually wanted to get more clinical involvement in NHS management, they could have gone back to the early days of PCTs, when they were called Primary Care Groups. Local docs, nurses and AHPs involved in decision making but not having to run NHS management, or privatise anything, or break anything up so it can be picked over by KPMG and Capita and the like.

But what can we do to stop it?

No, really, what can I do?

Write to my MP and...........?

what else? It's the railway sell off all over again, and look how well THAT worked out.

Patients Association might be campaigning? Or the health unions - Unison might welcome support from the public?

Someone in this thread said the 'debate' was needed.

THIS IS NOT A DEBATE THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT.

Untried, untested, unwelcome and it's gambling with jobs and the sickest, most vulnerable people in the country.

It's all utter, utter nonsense... we are being reformed by a person who doesn't even understand what we do.

And he is hitting PCT's the hardest - he is raping a service that supported his own family with what he has in the past has described as a high level of care.

I am disgusted

And terrified

I have a child to feed and it is coming clear he may need help from the NHS...

If you think this an exciting debate at a time for change then seriously you either need your head testing or you have a bloody good private medicine package!

I was in hospital awake for five days straight with no TV after having an emergency C-section when the election happened, so I don't know who has the majority in this coalition thing or how exactly it came about but what do you expect when you vote Tory? people never learn, the Tory scum would sell there own mothers, everyone knows this every time they get in power it's the same over and over again, the Tories tax us all to hell while giving the fat cats the moon on a stick and privatise anything they can get there hands on, then labour comes in and borrows money to try and fix everything and racks our debts up leading to the Tories coming in again it happens over and over.

As for the cowardly Lib Dems, that'll teach people to vote for them, no one will ever be doing that again I'm sure.

Nothing the ConDems do surprises me this country is down the toilet it's been doing that for years anyway, the ConDems are now punching it in the face a few times and nicking it's wallet before it disappears down the bowl.

It's not a clear cut Party political issue. GP led commissioning was originally a Labour policy with pilot consortia rolled out under the previous administration.

The full proposals are not yet out - they are to be published today. I'm interested to see what they actually say (rather than what journalists have chosen to report on them so far).

No, it certainly isn't a clear-cut party issue. As with tuition fees, Blair made this possible with his encouragement of the principle of market-based public-service provision. But I hope that the renewed Labour Party can come up with some very trenchant opposition to the reforms. I don't trust them to lead opposition, though. I don't know what the best thing to do it, but for a start I would like to see a clear public voice in support of all the health-related unions for any action they take.

Our local hospital has ALREADY built the surgical centre to be used by private companies, with NHS staff, on NHS land. Take a look at your own local hospital, I bet many have already built the private facilities.

Don't kid yourselves, this plan was initiated under Labour. These things always take years before they're announced to the public.

It all boils down to money over people every time.

No-one has the courage to stop and re-evaluate "ideology" and accept that all human life is equally valuable, regardless of gender, colour, age, creed and ability, and that money is the thing that causes the inequalities.

Even if you accept and believe that as an individual, all the time that principal is tested, because it's "not realistic". It's only not realistic if you believe it is.

We live in a world where it is apparently "ideologically" unsound and "naive" to truly want to live in peace and harmony and equality and see everybody treated well, and if you express those sentiments you are regarded as well, a bit "mad". So you go around trying to live responsibly as an individual and despairing because lots of people obviously feel the same, but trying to "do" anything co-herent about it is constantly undermined by the practicalities which are all created by..... money.

"Big Society" actually seems to mean that some people are bigger than others. Like some people are more equal than others, allegedly.

We say it's "human nature" but I sometimes think that's an excuse.

These NHS issues are such a reflection of money over people. How can caring for the sick and needy ever be quantified in monetary terms? What happened to the concept of vocation? Why does "good organisation" have to depend on systems that ultimately relate to "money" over "people"?

Think about the language that is now applied to everything - "clients" "service-users" etc. That is the language of business, not humans.

I used to think I was a bit thick because when my son went into the education system I felt bamboozled by the terminology used. It's the same now when I read anything to do with politics.

Politicians used to talk in rhetoric and with passion, and policies were clearly defined by their beliefs. Now it seems they all talk the same language - making money.

Am I being particularly negative? Am I seeing what I want to see? Am I a bit "delusional"? Because although many people tell me things aren't that bad, I wonder if it is the way we have been brainwashed over the last 40 years or so by the Powers That Be that resistance, or doing things differently, is a futile effort.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Hang the cost, and if you don't want to play because it feels all wrong, it's your problem, not anyone elses.

Campaigns - great, let's get to it. But every principal will be manipulated and negotiated until you think you've got what you want, and then you discover the catch.

Labour "got it all wrong".

The Conservatives are "getting it all wrong".

Can anybody get it "right"?

More to the point, has anyone got the courage to try and do so?

They might lose money.

Can't have that.

Money and property are valued more highly than life in our justice system.

Think about it.

This terrifies me, it really does.

I've just been through breast cancer, the NHS was brilliant, first class.

I'm now desperately trying to arrange my reconstruction as early as possible. I had hoped to wait a while, but I genuinely don't know that I'll have so many options on the NHS a year down the line.

I'm just hoping this bastard is beaten, because I'm not confident that this 'new' NHS would provide me with anything like the same standard of care.

An awful lot of out-of-hours primary care is already delivered by private companies. So between the hours of 5/6pm and 9am weekdays and all weekend, you are under the care of GPs employed by private companies.

It's well known that lots of GPs do a bit of out-of-hours work to supplement their terrible wages

Doing one night a week of on-call work will earn the GP concerned approximately £25,000 per annum: 4K more than the annual salary of a newly qualified (by degree) registered nurse.

I think doctors are overpaid relative to others within the health service.