1 April - “Delay, Deny and Hope You Die”
Sometimes
I wonder if my own views on the state of the NHS might be a little extreme; GPs too often
incompetent lazy wotnots and nurses may not be the caring angels of folklore.
When I related how a couple of years ago that my then GP announced he no longer
intended to see patients at all I was called a liar on Twitter, but fortunately I no longer
have to say what I think and instead can report what Bexley GP Bob Gill says.
I knew from watching
his YouTube videos that he believes that the NHS is being
lined up for American style privatisation and that was very much his theme last Wednesday evening.
In the US, if you can get health insurance at all, the policy excess may be in the order of
$10,000 and it doesn’t even buy you good care. The third biggest cause of death
in the USA is medical negligence and the British government recruited the
President of their biggest Health Care company to head up NHS England and elevated him to the House of Lords.
Doctor Bob Gill is not a random social media nutter and backed up every single
one of the statements that may be read below with copies of the original
government documents and videos of proceedings in Parliament and
its equivalents in the USA plus White House interviews with presidents.
My hurried scribbling may not have always accurately recorded the titles of the
various quangos and committees which are furtively working towards NHS privatisation - so have largely avoided naming them - but
the basic facts are as stated. All the legislation is now in place to allow privatisation.
If one discounts Richard Nixon plotting something similar in the USA, the oldest
supporting document was from 1977 when Nicholas Ridley MP presented soon to be
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with
his blueprint for privatisation and specifically the privatisation by
stealth of the NHS. Over the 50 following years the NHS has been systematically
carved up with that in mind. Simply privatising the lot in one go would be
politically unacceptable but piecemeal, through division into autonomous Trusts
etc. makes it feasible.
Oliver Letwin and John Redwood laid further foundations for it in 1988 with their
Centre for Policy Studies and Tony Blair’s Government pursued the same aims with
the ruinous PFIs and the servicing of debts has become a primary reason for there not
being enough beds. Queen Mary’s was debt free so it had to be sold off for
housing to pay for other parts of the same Trust. “PFI is the way that
taxpayers’ money can be sucked out into private hands.”
Doctor Gill digressed to cover the effect on four of his patients all of whom
are now dead. One lady he sent to Urgent Care with symptoms and even I with zero medical
qualifications correctly guessed might be the cause. From there she went to St. Mary’s who sent her home having diagnosed
a virus. As a result of this incompetence the lady spent a year in King’s
College Intensive Care at a cost of thousands per day before dying “a quivering wreck”. (†)
Four London Trusts, all failed miserably.
A young man with a spinal problem was denied a scan and sent home. He became
paralysed and died of sepsis when his problem “should have been obvious to a
first year medical student”. Doctors who care for patients in the old fashioned
way are told they are “too sensitive” and reminded that they should not care
because death reduces costs.
“Mind shattering incompetence” is obvious in our local hospitals and whistle
blowers are shown the door scaring the wits out of otherwise decent staff from
Consultant to Porter. Doctors “falsify the records” because they know that “the
only way to the top is to say the right thing”. “CCGs operate in a way that
might be expected of North Korea.”
For every 80 patients who face A&E delays one is dying as a direct result of
those delays but “when Matt Hancock caused 20,000 deaths and is not in jail” why
should anyone care?
The object of it all is to drive up private profits and under reforms brought in
by Kenneth Clark private providers are allowed to keep the money for themselves
if it is not spent on patients. Hence the title of today’s epistle. Some local
GPs do nothing but employ juniors and extract more than £100k, per year profit from the
business without ever having to see a patient. And then sell the business to
American conglomerates. “The GP’s priority is to maximise
their income and that affects mortality.” Unions such as Unite and the Royal
College of Nursing are complicit in the move towards privatisation and Dr. Gill
pleaded with union members in the audience to complain to their leaders.
A total of 31 medical procedures have succumbed to the financial cuts on top of
which some hospitals are unable to cope with emergencies. There is no
resusitation team or blood transfusion service at St. Mary’s for example.
It was a very depressing two hours.
† I may have conflated two of the four patient reports here. My shorthand was not sufficient to keep up.
