BMA Demands Govt Faces Up To NHS Damage

The Britiah Medical Association (BMA) has demanded the government faces up to the damage it has done to the NHS, and work with doctors to make it better.

In his address to the BMA annual representative meeting in Harrogate, BMA council chair Mark Porter accused the government of ‘not getting it’ on the NHS.However, he told ministers it wasn't too late to change.

Dr Porter said the government had broken a promise to end top-down reorganisation of the NHS.

He said: "Nobody's perfect, we've all made the odd promise we couldn't keep. But has a promise to the NHS ever been quite so needlessly, recklessly broken as that promise not to impose change from the top?"

Dr Porter said that the Health and Social Care Act reorganisation had cost at least £1.6bn, dragged the NHS further from its founding vision, and contributed to a bumper year for the multinationals 'who find the curative so lucrative'.

He highlighted the 'bizarre market culture' created despite reassurances from regulators, which had led to some commissioners going to extraordinary lengths to meet the government’s competition agenda.

This included clinical commissioning groups in Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes that had spent more than £3m asking 500 providers – including several dissolved NHS trusts and clinics around the world – for expressions of interest in running local services.

Although most of the Health and Social Care Act did not apply in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there were threats to health services across the UK, according to Dr Porter.

Dr Porter said that doctors in every branch of practice were under pressure, and that a government obsession with cuts risked undermining contract negotiations for consultants in England and Northern Ireland, and for junior doctors across the UK.

(CVS/CD)