One year on

It is now a year since many a disenchanted doctor had to endure the disaster that was MTAS 2007. One year on I hardly think trainee doctors in the NHS feel much brighter and more positive, then again I hardly think that senior doctors are bursting with enthusiasm for the current state of affair.

Tooke has come along and suggested many sensible things, he deserves a lot of credit for showing some integrity when so many in positions of power have shown so little, mentioning no names, the BMA and the Department of Health.

The same incompetent and misguided fools are still in charge of the asylum, meaning that we are still coursing at full speed towards a very nasty precipice, again mentioning no names, Liam Donaldson, Sarah Thomas, Clare Chapman et al.

The government is doing what is has done to medical training across the board, ie railroading through top down idiocy in an antidemocratic, short sighted and frankly foolish manner. In this way health, education and society in general are being woefully mismanaged.

On the medical front, the government has done diddly squat to prevent a massive cohort of excellent experienced doctors leave medicine plus or minus the country that they would rather stay in, if it wasn't for this morally bankrupt regime.

Several of my close friends have emigrated, I am sure that this is the same for many of us, while I know that many of my colleagues and possibly myself may well join this cohort should we not be lucky enough to get the rub of the green. This is utterly stupid and totally preventable.

The UK is under doctored, while the consultant expansion that was promised has not fully materialised; the crazy thing is that the work is out there to be done, but this government would rather fiddle waiting lists and employ bean counters to manipulate statistics, than actually employ people who can actually do a bloody well useful and essential job. Money is now spent on avoiding work rather than actually doing the work that needs to be done, useless rationing quangos have proliferated and front line services continue to be starved of cash.

The government is afraid of those with intelligence and skill, so it prefers to treat us with disdain than with respect, it prefers to empower the undereducated and under skilled to do our jobs less well. How the mainstream media, on the whole, have failed to catch on to this catastrophic waste of talent and dumbing down of professional standards is beyond me, but then again the likes of the BBC don't really have the energy to report the news anymore, they just tend to lazily reproduce what they are fed by their masters.

Everything is now seen it terms of short term economic gains. People are earners of money, not human beings with feelings and emotions. Nothing is worth doing unless it produces an economic profit, so what is the point in being nice to people, why ever care, why ever show compassion?

Universities are the coalmines of the 21st century, there is no point learning things to achieve academic excellence, there is no need to seek absolute truths, after all if it has no economic value attached it is pointless. We should all be mining for coal.

The government is now applying this logic to health care, health care is now a commodity, just like coal. Patient in, patient out, money in, money out, service done, who cares for the quality of the service or the human cost, it's just a matter of counting up the coal at the end of the day.

Decisions are not now made by doctors on sensible clinical grounds, they are made by ignorami in offices with no medical knowledge on economic grounds. 'Patient safety' is reinvented as a concept by non medical suits, despite the fact that everything a doctor learns is in its pursuit, it is another pulsus paradoxicus of Labour's NHS, say one thing but the precise opposite happens, just like the disingenuous gimmick of 'patient choice' which would be more appropriately termed 'government diktat'.

Would it not be sensible to stop and think for a second, is health care really a commodity like any other, doesn't the way we treat out fellow man define who we really are? Doesn't it make us rather inhumane if we simply treat patients as items that are rolled out on a factory production line? Economics is important, this is true, but there are many other needs we have as intensely social beings that are completely ignored by this type of economic tunnel vision. Targets, beans, coal, depressing, control freakery, grim, gloom. This is not the way medicine should be going.