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Behind the spin lies a dark, deep winter for the NHS
ON paper it may not have seemed all that much.
It amounted to an announcement, made yesterday (Wednesday), that Joe Liddane had been appointed as the new chairman of the Whittington Hospital Trust in place of Narendra Makanji (see p5).
But it could be cogently argued that behind the announcement lies a dilemma facing the National Health Service.
What it could be said to come down to is: Which road is the NHS going to take?
Will it remain a publicly owned service, paid for by the taxpayer?
Or a service that, at the very best, is run like a mixed economy, part public, part private?
Or, at the worst, end up as a private Health insurance system along the American lines?
Is all this too dark a predicted future for the NHS?
The answer depends on how much reliance you are prepared to put on the drip, drip of government initiatives and reports. If you accept them at face value, the future, admittedly, looks rosy.
But if you see them as, worryingly, many senior members of the medical profession do – that is, as pure spin – then you may conclude that the NHS is indeed heading for a deep winter.
At the core of the removal of Whittington’s chairman, Mr Makanji, lies a question of trust.
It can be said that the inner circle of high civil servants controllers of the NHS in London do not trust Mr Makenji to navigate the Whittington towards the safe shores of a Foundation Hospital.
Whatever the arguments for the creation of a foundation hospitals, the fact is that they are more business oriented, more independent of the existing system of hospitals, more inclined to poach medical staff, all of which leads to a more fragmented NHS – and beyond that beckons further privatisation.
Thus, Mr Makanji, with his Labour background, had to go.
And in to his chair had to come someone who knows his way around the business world, someone with business contacts, global business contacts, if possible, and that someone would have to be someone like Mr Liddane.
In his capacity as Whittington’s chairman Mr Liddane will no doubt do a splendid job.
Who can doubt that he will help Whittington join University London College Hospital as a foundation Hospital.
But is that the road the Whittington should be taking?
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