NHS: Fight or Flight?
Nursing, psychiatry, surgery, general practising – all of these disciplines our under threat of becoming unavailable to the poorest in society in the UK. With David Cameron and his band of axe wielding maniacs there is a very real possibility that the NHS in its current publicly funded form could become a thing of the past. The Conservative pledge to ring fence the entire organisation could not be further from the truth as sweeping reforms become reality.
Many posts like community nursing jobs are widely available at the moment, but with doctors and nurses all looking frightened it may be only a matter of time before the jobs dry up. Like many people I love the NHS. No other country in the world has a system quite like it. Many have begun to copy the organisation as best they can which just goes to show how much it is admired and how much the UK should be proud of it. Whilst public finances have to be balanced – in that there is no doubt – it is dangerous to allow private companies to take control of some of the services as the government is proposing.
The changes that are most worrying include the plans to allow ‘any qualified provider'to deliver NHS services. We all know that private companies exist for one reason alone: to turn a profit. Opening up the very public service the NHS provides to an external corporation or private company is frightening to say the least. We need only look at the state of the healthcare system in the US to see just how badly private medicine affects a population. More people in the US die from inadequate access to treatment then anything else. Think about that for a moment. Now apply that to Britain. It is a terrifying thought.
Many doctors and nurses are concerned and rightly so. The NHS may not be perfect but they know just how much worse it could be were private companies allowed to have free reign in providing services to the organisation. Whilst it is true that in essence, encouraging some competition within the organisation could be a good thing, the danger lies in what could happen if you allow too many companies to tender. We all know what happened with the Public Private Partnership Investment programme for the tube in London – several of the companies couldn’t complete the works required to the budgets they themselves originally tendered and several more collapsed! To apply this situation to the NHS will mean that in ten years time there might be no NHS left!
We are all living in tough times, economically and socially. That does not mean we should be dismantling the very things which give us our identity just to serve a ‘quick fix'mentality. There is a whole generation of children eager to become doctors and nurses and who have learnt how lucky the UK is to have the NHS. If we allow even one section of the service to be under private control, then we will have not only let down those children, but ourselves as well.
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