By Vivienne Russell | 23 June 2014
The coalition’s NHS reforms have a created a ‘bizarre market culture’, while the drive for efficiency savings has destabilised services, the head of the British Medical Association has warned.
In his address on the opening day of the BMA’s annual conference in Harrogate, chair of council Dr Mark Porter said some commissioners were going to extraordinary lengths to meet the government’s competition agenda.
He cited commissioners in Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes who he said had spent more than £3m asking 500 providers, including some dissolved trusts, for expressions of interest in running local services.
‘Let’s imagine the bureaucracy that [writing to 500 providers] could generate. Let’s imagine the other commissioners that, right now, might well be doing exactly the same,’ Porter told delegates.
‘Now, the government will no doubt say that commissioning decisions are made locally. Monitor has told us that not all services need to be put out to tender. But whatever the reassurances, a bizarre market culture has been created.’
He went on the say that commissioners were decent and intelligent people trying to manage the NHS but were being ‘driven to distraction by the madness of the market’.
Porter also criticised the government’s failure to find a solution to the financial crisis in the NHS. Efficiency savings were just cuts, he asserted.
‘The experience of every healthcare worker, every doctor, is of having resources cut ever year,’ he said.
‘We are seeing cuts that are driven by an uninformed and arrogant assumption that the NHS is bloated and inefficient.
‘But when they have gone looking for savings, the bulk has not come from reducing waste. They have come from reducing tariffs, and this has destabilised services.’
