“Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.”
NHS REFORMS - ANOTHER EXPERIMENT
Below is a passage from a paper “Physician Productivity in the UK NHS” by Alan Maynard and Karen Bloor. This paper was presented in Melbourne, Australia, in November 2005, at the 9th Conference of the INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL WORKFORCE COLLABORATIVE.
The emphasis in this quotation are my own.
PROFESSOR ALAN MAYNARD
“radical reform in the roles of the workforce other than physicians is taking place. Pharmacists and nurse prescribers are to be given the right to prescribe the full formulae, although medical groups (e.g. the Committee on the Safety of Medicines) are now questioning the safety of such policy.
Nurses are being trained to carry out endoscopy, anaesthetics and minor surgery.
These reforms are part of Blair’s frustration with the slow rate of change in NHS service delivery. At the outset, he offered more funding in exchange for the NHS ‘acting smarter’. This exchange, he believes, has not been met by providers. More expenditure has not been accompanied by improved service delivery. Consequently, he is seeking to undermine the monopoly power of physicians with investment in other skill groups with enhanced roles. This bold policy is largely evidence free; many assert that nurses may be retrained to take over medical roles cost effectively but the quantity and quality of trials are poor.
Such issues have yet to inhibit the Government!”
And so, in November 2005, far far away from the UK, Alan Maynard, Professor of Health Economics, University of York, reveals that the bold NHS reforms are not backed by solid validation studies.
Shades of the MTAS experiment perhaps.
Also, although the man has since taken his leave, Tony Blair’s frustrations are still fueling NHS reforms.
And Alan Maynard tells The Antipodes that one of Blair’s aims in these reforms is to undermine the power of the physicians in the UK.
Something most of us always knew.
But it was probably never voiced so publically in the homeland.
_________________________________________________
LINK TO UK MISSING KIDS WEBSITE
LINK TO MISSING PERSONS WEBSITE
_________________________________________________
