The risk register for the controversial Health and Social Care Bill has been leaked (PDF version). The Guardian are going for it in their second edition.
It smells a bit odd that this early (September 2010) draft has leaked now. The final version might be much worse.
Is this a ruse to take attention off Cash for Cameron story?
Months before Tory NHS reforms were left battered by the majority of medical professionals and general public, David Cameron turned the air blue over Lansley’s disastrous Health Bill, it has emerged.
With severe problems emerging just months into his premiership, two government health advisers were dispatched to 10 Downing Street to give David Cameron and Steve Hilton a briefing. No sooner had the SpAds left the room, reports The Telegraph, that the prime minister turned to his senior aide and uttered the words:
“We’re f***ed.”
But yesterday saw the PM fist-bumping Andrew Lansley in a display of public backing for the reforms.
NHS patients will be collectively f***ed for the sake of Cameron’s political vanity.
The e-petition calling on the Government to drop its Health and Social Care Bill has now reached 139,400 signatures to become the second most popular campaign on Number 10’s official petition site – having already passed the 100,000 milestone to qualify for a debate in the House of Commons.
Overtaking a petition on immigration and a call for cheaper petrol and diesel, the appeal now stands just behind the much publicised plea for government disclosure of documents relating to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.
An MP will now take the petition to the Backbench Business Committee, who meet every Tuesday at 1pm, who will decide if the issue will be debated in the Commons.
While this builds the pressure on beleaguered Lansley, a debate seems unlikely given the government can barely find parliamentary time for the bill itself.
A healthcare corporation poised to cash-in on Andrew Lansley’s Health Bill operated an illegal organ donation syndicate, according to a new report. General Healthcare Group (GHG) is the British arm of health giant Netcare, who were found guility of operating a black market transplantation scheme which moved organs from impoverished Romanians and Brazilians to wealthy Israelis.
With a charge sheet almost as long as the list of Health Bill opponents, Netcare were fined £704,000 after trousering profits of more than £300,000 from the illegal scheme, in which documents were forged to make “donors” appear related to organ recipients. A suspected 109 illegal transplants took place between 2001 and 2003, with the court case finally concluding in 2010.
The scandal is highlighted in a report from the NHS Support Federation, which exposes the business backgrounds of the five-member Private Hospitals Alliance. The publication also reveals:
Naturally, GHG chair Sir Peter Gershon was recruited by the Tories prior to the 2010 election to be one of Cameron’s “independent efficiency experts” who earmarked £12 billion in health cuts.
With Ed Miliband citing calls for Andrew Lansley’s scalp from the Tory Reform Group at PMQs yesterday, it has now emerged that senior Conservative figures urged David Cameron to ditch the Health and Social Care Bill as long as six weeks ago. These are thought to include a “senior cabinet minister” and Tory whips.
The Times reports (£):
“Mr Cameron was urged six weeks ago to use his enhanced standing after the EU “veto” to quash the Health and Social Care Bill”
Time for some compulsory euthanasia for Andrew Lansley’s career.
A “Doncaster” doctor used by David Cameron to promote his health reforms yesterday has quit his commissioning group and doesn’t even live in Doncaster. The prime minister attempted to embarrass Miliband at PMQs by quoting a medical worker supposedly from his own constituency:
Speaking as acting chairman of the Doncaster pathfinder CCG he said this: ”Becoming one of the first national pathfinding areas is a real boost for Doncaster” … I think what is good for Doncaster is good for the rest of the NHS too.”
But the health profession magazine GP magazine has revealed that Dr Conner was no longer chairman of the commissioning group — at the cornerstone of Andrew Lansley’s controversial reforms — and had actually left the area.
Nice attack line. Shame about the facts.
The Department of Health has invoked free market thinker Adam Smith to rationalise further privatisation of the NHS. While impact assessments are supposedly prepared by neutral civil servants to “outline advantages and disadvantages of each option”, official papers underpinning the announcement last week of yet more tendering to external providers characterises current arrangements as “the great enemy of good management”.
With a reference to 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, the documents, which are signed by Andrew Lansley, quote the economist held as an inspiration to right wingers such as Margaret Thatcher:
In 1776 Adam Smith warned of the dangers of monopolies, ‘… monopoly… is the great enemy of good management’.
GCSE-style quotations aside, an evidence base for sound health policy is a little thin on the ground. As health analyst Roy Lilley points out, the document asserts the “NHS scores poorly on responsiveness to patients” and claims to know that “patients want choice” by citing an entry in the British Medical Journal in 2003 that is now inaccessible, and cancer survival rates published in an old edition of Eurocare without any proper reference.
[An Impact assessment] is not defined as ‘….bolstering the political rationale for undertaking unpopular change’ and certainly not to deliver a lecture on Adam Smith because John Maynard Keynes doesn’t fit the bill … It should be sent back to Tory Central Office – where I suspect it originated.
As if we needed any more evidence that NHS reorganisation is politically motivated.
Astonishing scenes transpired at St. Guy’s hospital today as a surgeon shouted at a group including the prime minister and his deputy as he demanded people leave an orthopaedic ward for breaches of hygiene regulations.
While government ministers are keen to be seen obeying hygiene guidelines during hospital photo opportunities, their entourage of media, press officers and political spinners seem to think this procedure is beneath them.
The surgeon, identified by Paul Waugh as joint replacement specialist David Nunn, railed:
“Just a minute! I am the senior orthapaedic surgeon in this department. Why is it that we’re all told to walk around like this and these people … [gestures towards staff behind camera]“
As the flummoxed pair, unaccustomed to being dressed down in this way, came to terms with what had just happened he repeated:
“I still mean it. Why are you? [Shouts] I’m not having it. Now out!”
Despite facing Labour’s health team in the Commons today, it seems that Andrew Lansley got off lightly by escaping the attentions of the surgeon.
