1 October 2010
The changes outlined in the NHS white paper could be ‘potentially damaging’, the British Medical Association said today.
The doctors’ union is warning that proposals to encourage greater competition would shift the focus on to ‘cost, rather than quality’. This would undermine attempts to work more collaboratively across primary and secondary care. The BMA asks if there is a less disruptive way to reduce bureaucracy without introducing substantial service changes at a time of major spending cuts.
The association also expresses ‘serious concerns’ about the target of all trusts achieving foundation status by 2013/14 and warns against delegating inappropriate management tasks to clinicians.
BMA chair Dr Hamish Meldrum said: ‘There are proposals in the white paper that doctors can support and want to work with. But there is also much that would be potentially damaging. The BMA has consistently argued that clinicians should have more autonomy to shape services for their patients, but pitting them against each other in a market-based system creates waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency.
‘Doctors want to build on the founding principles of the NHS, and to maintain and improve services despite the hugely challenging financial climate. However, they can only succeed if they can work in partnership with others in a co-operative environment.’
The BMA’s statement comes two days after the Unite union called the white paper ‘the biggest onslaught on the health service since 1948’.
Gail Cartmail, Unite’s assistant general secretary for public services, told the Labour Party conference on September 29: ‘The white paper is an untested, massively expensive exercise in political dogma that will herald privatisation of the health service – handing it over to any willing provider whose first loyalty is to their shareholders.’
‘Let us today pledge that we will together defend our NHS from this ideologically driven attack by a government who have no mandate to drive this white paper through Parliament.’
