Backlash mounts over government's NHS targets

Following hard on the heels of a damning Panorama report on NHS targets on Sunday, the BMA's chairman has mounted a ferocious assault on the government – claiming that a "creeping, morale-sapping erosion of doctors' clinical autonomy" has been brought about by Whitehall interference.

In a highly critical no-holds-barred speech to the BMA's annual conference in Torquay yesterday, Dr Ian Bogle hit out at the "stifling of innovation by excessive, intrusive audits and the imposition of Department of Health diktats.

"The shackling of doctors by prescribing guidelines, referral guidelines and protocols. The suffocation of professional responsibility by target-setting and production-line values that leave little room for the professional judgement of individual doctors or the needs of individual patients".

In his last speech as chairman, Dr Bogle added: "But the paranoid centralism which has characterised this and previous governments' handling of the NHS will not lead to improvements in patient care.

"It will turn professionals into bean counters answerable not to their patients but to politicians, auditors, commissioners and managers under pressure to deliver on edicts, priorities and targets emanating from Richmond House."

He said that "national standards, quality markers and assessment of individual and team performance" were essential in a modern, patient-centred NHS.

But ministers and managers had gone further and "muscled in on the doctor-patient relationship, and we now have a healthcare system driven not by the needs of individual patients but by spreadsheets and tick boxes".

The government also came under fire for trumpeting "inappropriate adjustments" - or fiddling - of targets data as successes in pursuit of attaining a better health service.

Dr Bogle said that the highlights of his tenure would be negotiating successes and "the sour taste of acid encounters with self-serving secretaries of state".

Commenting on the speech, Dr Evan Harris MP, Lib Dem Shadow Health Secretary, urged the BMA to boycott "political diktats" and treat patients not targets.

However, he said that the BMA was "foolish" to sign up to the target-based approach in the NHS Plan in the first place.

"Perhaps they were duped into thinking that patient care would come before news management under Labour," he added.

Tory Shadow Health Secretary Dr Liam Fox said that no one was fooled by "the government’s doctored figures in the NHS".

“Clinicians should be free to decide who to treat, and when. Labour ministers frequently force doctors to ignore clinical priorities, and work instead according to their political priorities. This is unethical and unacceptable," he added.

The Tory frontbencher also pledged the party would adopt the scrapping of NHS targets as policy.

(GMcG)