|
|
 |
| |
Remember health is not like a car production line
• JOHN Gulliver’s item about NHS roadshows and polyclinics has prompted me to write (These £1m NHS roadshows are a ‘sham’ operation, May 8).
I attended the Keep Camden GPs in the NHS group on Tuesday which voted against the idea of polyclinics, as it did to save Camidoc from the hands of private money like UnitedHealth getting their hands on it.
This is the legacy of Blairism, an ideology performed with missionary zeal and taxpayers’ money for so-called consultation (for this read dictation) over reforms (read privatisation for reforms) of public services.
The proponents of these consultations have no interest in what the public think and see campaign groups against them as a bloody nuisance. The public are too busy trying to survive with the latest round of punitive taxes forcing them to work longer to pay the bills than to pursue writing and agreeing or objecting to polyclinics. It was the same with the consultation over the three GPs surgeries in Camden with UnitedHealth taking over and firing doctors as soon as they took over. These cliques, like the PCTs that implement these government directives, are like wildebeest falling over each other in a mad race to get a knighthood or a golden something for implementing them. The ordinary public, who they claim to serve, don’t count.
This government, like the USA whose coat-tails of health policy they are hanging on to, should really “listen” or else they will find themselves in the political wilderness in years to come, as the mayoral and local elections results proved. Health is not a car production line with shareholders and a floating on the stock market. It is a public service and if the government got its political priorities right, it would not spend billions on replacing Trident and stopped its military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan so there would be plenty of funds for public services they claim to so desperately care for!
Trouble is they don’t, that’s why we have the privatisation chaos we have now.
Clem Alford
Tavistock Mansions, WC1
It is all change since GP takeover
An open letter to Liz Wise, director of contracts and performance, Camden Primary Care Trust
• Dear Liz Wise,
Over the telephone, and in three separate letters (after your decision to award the contracts to UnitedHealth for three Camden surgeries including mine) you “reassured” me that there would be no big changes when UnitedHealth take over.
I would be seeing the same doctors and nurses.
Not three weeks after the takeover two doctors were dismissed (one of them an exceptionally able and popular doctor who has been at the surgery for 18 years, and happens to be the one I see).
Two nurses have left because they do not want to work for American shareholders.
On Tuesday last the surgery was so depleted of doctors that patients had to wait for much longer than usual.
You also told me several times that what was happening was not privatisation, it was all still part of the National Health Service.
If this is the case why can we not know the contracts that have been offered to the doctors, their conditions of service, which certainly affect us, the patients, and for which we pay as taxpayers?
We have an absolute right to know how our money is being spent.
I also want to know the details of why my own doctor was dismissed, and subsequently temporarily reinstated.
Most of us understand that a comprehensive health service can financially be a bottomless pit, and some adjustments may have to be made, but at present all this primary care trust is doing is spending a great deal of our money to give a worse service.
You often mention “value for money” yet since these takeovers, we the taxpayers pay not only the doctors and yourselves, but also the UnitedHealth administrators, their executives, and their shareholders.
Please explain how this is good value for money?
I understand that the baby clinic at Camden Road has been stopped, and I can point to various things which have been done at Camden Road which are unnecessary and wasteful, such as redecorating the walls to advertise UnitedHealth (they were in excellent condition before), removing all the chairs and substituting expensive new ones.
There have always been excellent doctors (like the ones at my practice) and some inadequate practitioners.
This will not change as a result of destroying all practices and building polyclinics.
There are other ways of organising general practice, for example, the model adopted in Tower Hamlets and particularly the Epsom EDICS, run by doctors and nurses to include patients, who plough back any profit into the NHS.
There is a rumour that the first polyclinics will be at University College London Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital.
What sort of sense does that make?
Less local access (for example for mothers with sick children and without a car), no continuity of care and more expense.
Unfortunately everything that you do reveals the real motives of this government (and, implicitly, yourselves) that is to hive off the NHS for private profit and in the process to de-professionalise the general practitioners.
Ruth Ingram
Camden Mews, NW1
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
