NHS saw opportunity for income generation from first child gender clinic in Belfast

[WarriorN]

Northern Ireland’s health authorities believed there was a possibility for “income generation” when Belfast Trust set up a new child gender clinic offering medical interventions, documents seen by the News Letter reveal.

rt by Nick Wallis.
https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/politics/exclusive-nhs-saw-an-opportunity-for-income-generation-from-first-child-gender-clinic-in-belfast-5614982

https://x.com/newsletter_pols/status/2027534462540497301?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

Nick:

Good grief.

Thanks Warrior and how utterly vile but entirely predictable it is that the concern was for revenue generation rather than safeguarding children.

Yes. Utterly vile but entirely predictable is what it is. I hope this story goes further - I’m sure Nick will make sure of it.

Would this not just be a result of the 'internal market' that was foisted on the NHS by the reforms of the Cameron govt, though? I.e., all capacity building, for all forms of NHS treatment, would have had an eye on assessing any potential for treating out-of-area patients for a fee.

I mean, of course it is concerning in this context because of the fact that the treatments on offer were damaging and unevidenced. But if it had simply been stroke services, or whatever, the same income-generating potentials may have been discussed as a matter of course.

In other words, I don't think the story amounts to any sort of reason for believing that 'gender affirming' treatments were being pushed for money, as in the US.

Thats a good question. I don’t know but Nick seems to rate the journalist who broke the story. It would be one to ask them. At the same time it illustrates that it’s an area that can be accessed privately and perhaps therefore is more choice and cash driven than the “absolute death defying need” often postured.

I’m struggling to think how children with anorexia or other MH conditions might be treated in this way, although the use of private companies via right to choose might come under it? I don’t know enough to comment properly. Nick would, I’m sure.

Completely agree. Medical institutions 'may money' by selling services.

The issue here is that the service is completely unevidenced.

This actually demonstrates how normalised the whole trans train system has become.

But when judging this it absolutely matters what those services are. Selling stroke care, appendectomies or nose jobs raise vastly different moral issues to selling sterilisation to troubled children.

Quite.

I’m accessing one of these set ups for a minor issue that I could choose not to have done. It pales into insignificance next to what they’re doing to an otherwise healthy bodied child.

He was on the Nolan Investigates Stonewall podcast I think.

Horrendous. But not surprising in the slightest.

I've always taken issue with payments for certain things within the NHS.

At one point NHS trusts lost money for high CS rates.
There's been lots of women threatened with removal or actually removed from GP lists because they declined having a smear and GPs were given money for have a certain % of their patients take up a test (waves - yep I was threatened). This practice has since been outlawed but I believe still persists.
And there's a whole lot more.

I've recently had an issue with DS. Long story about protecting budgets between areas basically. Complaint upheld and they are changing systems.

As others say though this is an experimental treatment on children though. This is a whole other level of low.

It's appalling.

I don't think Northern Ireland has a internal market in the same way as England has though, our health service is not the same - we don't have "right to choose" for example.

Edwin Poots was the minister in charge at the time and he's on record now as opposing puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgery for children. However, the journalists investigating this issue are showing that either Poots was involved in giving the go ahead for this happening to NI kids or he wasn't paying attention to what was going on under his management while this was all being set up.

Poots doesn't come out of this situation well in either way. Nor does the Belfast Health Trust because they have been maximalist in their adoption and promotion of Genderism.

It looks like a non-story to me as it's is just the way that the NHS works. It's the reason that the Tavistock GIDS mushroomed because patients from all over the country were being referred & the Trusts cross charged by the Tavistock so that GIDS was a significant chunk of overall income for the Tavistock.

Journalist David Thompson - wasn't he involved in The Nolan Show's investigation into Stonewall?

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09yjmph

Stephan Nolan was the presenter but David Thompson is the Irish journalist who did all the leg work on the Nolan Investigates Stonewall podcast.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09yjmph

There's a couple of new names around on this board who've been reviving threads from a decade or more ago. All that's making me wonder is - which stories are they trying to bury? This thread seems like something some people might prefer to go unnoticed. [BUMP]

Thompson left the BBC and is now working for The Newsletter and he is regularly covering Genderism and its effects on the law, the public sector, and children and women's rights in his journalism. He's a tenacious journalist so I'm glad to see someone in NI taking this seriously.

I’m inclined to think, given his expertise and also Nick’s, that this is definitely not a non story

This is reminding me of the board papers from the Tavistock, talking about the marketing opportunities arising from the BBC Programme "I Am Leo".

Yes & no. During the New Labour era there was far greater enthusiasm for EBM & as ever, the Treasury wanted pretty metrics that showed short-term "value for money", that's how so many people get unsuitably funnelled into 6-week "treatment packages" for complex longterm psych issues. The Tavi, as a psychoanalytic service, was under threat, just like the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, because neither looked good to either Treasury or EBM.

Gender had stacks of papers so to the untrained political eye, it satisfied "has evidence", it had defined, physical "treatments" & looked sciencey. For Tavi management it was an ideal fig leaf with which to protect the Tavi as a whole, both by generating income & by making the Tavi look more "medical" than purely psychoanalytic.

Lansley's 2012 Health & Social Care Act did balkanise the NHS, introduced insane levels of admin, & divorced the Secretary of State for Health from real responsibility for what happened in the NHS, which is a lot of the story of how things got so mad - it gave a whole slew of administrators more power, left them fighting for dwindling resources, & conveniently diffused responsibility.

Many of the same things seem to have played out in NI, particularly with respect to responsibility.

Edited for text I somehow managed to delete first time round.