BMA Denounce NHS Reforms As 'Not Fit For Purpose'

The British Medical Association (BMA) has warned that creeping privatisation in primary care could result in profit-driven firms replacing GP’s in key roles of deciding patients treatment needs.

The relationship between family doctors and patients would suffer irreparable damage the BMA said on Thursday, adding that the NHS reforms would be "irreversibly damaging to the NHS”. In the strongest criticism yet of the health and social care bill the BMA condemned it as "complex, incoherent and not fit for purpose, and almost impossible to implement successfully, given widespread opposition across the NHS workforce".

The criticism came in a letter sent to 22,000 family doctors by chairman of the BMA’s GPs committee Dr Laurence Buckman. The letter also hinted that GPs could potentially pull out of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), groups of doctors due to replace NHS primary care trusts from April 2013, by urging them to take “an active stand to thwart reforms”.

Buckman's key criticism focuses on the role of the organisations that will provide commissioning support services (CSSs) to CCGs in the reformed NHS. "These bodies will initially do some or all of the 'back office' functions, but we fear that, in time, they could become the de facto CCG management. CSSs will be required to be outside the NHS as 'freestanding enterprises' and in a market of commissioning support for CCGs as 'customers', by 2016 at the latest," he writes.

"We believe that this will lead to the privatisation of commissioning, destroy the public health dimension to commissioning, with a loss of local accountability to local populations, and is likely to exacerbate health inequalities."

Speaking about Buckman’s letter the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said it was, "a devastating critique of the government's plans. It takes them apart, piece-by-piece. This illustrates the government's irresponsibility in ploughing on, if they don't listen to this. Dr Buckman is saying that as the profession is overwhelmingly against [the bill], when so much of the reforms depend on the profession, [continuing with the bill] is dangerous."

(H/GK)