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The privatisation juggernaut rumbles on regardless
IT had to come sooner or later in this part of London.
Five years ago New Labour injected a dose of private medicine in the National Health Service.
The principles of the free market had been first introduced under Thatcherism in a
shake-up of hospitals in the late 80s.
But then New Labour, emboldened by a third election victory, went the whole hog.
It encouraged private “treatment centres” to open in the provinces where relatively uncomplicated operations could be performed by teams of private surgeons set up to reduce waiting times at NHS clinics.
Critics in the NHS were afraid these “centres” – created by private companies, basically, to make a profit – would simply pick the patients facing simple procedures leaving the more complex – and costly – cases for hospitals to cope with.
The financial rationale for these “centres” was pretty simple: a quick turnover of patients equalled lower overheads and higher profit margins.
Leading figures in the British Medical Association, supported by consultants, responsible for junior doctors, also argued that their training would suffer as simpler cases would be swallowed up by the conveyor-belt system of the “treatment centres”.
Deaf ears were turned to all these objections by the government.
Now, at last, a private “centre”, under the apparent stewardship of the NHS, is to open at St John’s and Elisabeth Hospital, St John’s Wood (see page 6).
It is probable that queues of patients waiting for simple day surgery cases at local hospitals will shorten as the “centre” gets under way.
Understandably, perhaps, the average patient may not give much thought for junior doctors whose training suffers.
The fact that this will have a knock-on effect on the standards of professionalism in the NHS is something they will, rightly, expect the strategists to have taken into their calculations.
The fact that they have failed is certainly worrying the higher echelons of the profession.
Vocal critics also argue that by contractually paying “centres” a fixed fee irrespective of whether the projected number of operations are performed, the NHS will end up, effectively, subsiding private companies.
But infatuated with the neo-liberal concept that private is good and public is bad the government, encouraged by the Junior Health Minister Lori Darzi, himself an eminent surgeon, march on, head down, convinced they are right and that their critics, however eminent, are wrong.
And all this at a time when the public mood – judging by various polls – is turning against the wildness of the free market and in favour of more state control and regulation. |
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