NHS Funding: Take On The Doctors!

The debate about NHS funding has been going on since the day it was founded. The nature of the project is that such a debate is part of its culture. Unfortunately the measures introduced to find efficiency savings involve the creation of a huge bureaucracy, which uses up in its own costs the savings it manages to make. However there is one set of measures which were not tackled at the very beginning and until they are the problems will never be solved. These involve the NHS’s relationship with its doctors.

At the beginning GPs refused to join and were eventually persuaded to do so by being allowed to remain private and self employed, but under contract to the NHS to provide a service. The hospital doctors and other specialists likewise were difficult, so they were bought off by being offered a lavish salary package as NHS employees, while being allowed to go on making big money in private practice. The only condition was that they give 40 odd hours  per week to justify their salary. Thus it is that GPs work business hours and not at weekends and huge waiting lists exist for hospital procedures. A friend of mine who needed an operation was recently told by her consultant that she would have to go on a list and wait about four months, but if she went private, he could operate the following Wednesday. The reason the NHS does not work as it should, except in emergency, is because all but junior hospital doctors work part time.

The craven class of politicians now in vogue at Westminster quake at the thought of taking on the doctors. Even Thatcher, who took on the Unions, the Argentineans and the IRA, shrank form challenging the medics. To sort them out is very simple. Make them all full time employees of the National Health Service and ban them from moonlighting. Then we would get our ops in timely fashion and be able to see a GP whenever we were ill. The waiting list industry would be closed down and suddenly money would flow directly to patient care. Here it would be found to go much further.

To do this you do not need political brains or PR skills. You need courage.

 

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