"The Health Committee will publish its Third Report of Session 2007-08 on Modernising Medical Careers (HC 25-I) on 8 May 2008 at 00.01 am. A Press Conference will be held at 10 am on Wednesday 7 May in Committee Room 5, Palace of Westminster. Please note: that all comments made at this press conference will be strictly embargoed until publication of the report at 00.01 am on Thursday 8 May 2008. Embargoed copies of the report will be available from Committee Room 5 on Wednesday 7 May at 9.30 am."I wait with interest to see what the Health Committee will have to offer when it passes judgement on MMC. I expect this type of political committees to swallow a fair amount of the DoH's propaganda, however there are limits and surely they must be able to see what a dismal failure MMC has been thanks to some rather corrupt political agendas lurking beneath the surface that have been pushed through by some rather compliant 'leaders' of the medical profession.
Medical training should be sculpted with the interests of patients at its heart, unfortunately MMC has been crafted with the aim of deprofessionalisation the medical profession and privatising the health service, and this has worked directly against the short and long term interests of patients in this country.
The deprofessionalistion has gone hand in hand with a national initiative of devaluing proper education and training via the Skillification advocated by Labour crony Lord Leitch. In the NHS this has seen the dangerous empowerment of a wide variety of undertrained and undereducated workers, justified by the logic of people with no experience of medicine and health care provision.
The aim is the opening up of the market, as this is seen as the holy grail in the naive free market fundamentalists' warped master plan. In their pea sized brains there is no danger in empowering the ignorant to do things way beyond their means, as the market will magically prevent any harm being done. In reality harm does result, as consumers are not perfectly educated and perfectly informed to make sensible rational decisions. In reality a lot of useless and/or dangerous rubbish can be peddled successfully in the 'perfect' free market, as the brainwashing of consumers with manipulative advertising and the exploitation of the consumer's uneducated ignorance can combine to devastating effect.
One only has to take a small glimpse around to see the garbage that is peddled dishonestly in the name of improving one's health; back street surgery by untrained surgeons, multivitamins, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, osteopathy, reflexology et al. I wonder what the free marketeers would say to this, the consumer does not appear to behave at all rationally or cleverly with these stupid decisions.
Anyway I digress, but the point I'm trying to make is that MMC is part of a perverse and stupid vision for health care provision that has been plopped out of the back passages of idiots who have no concept of what it takes to provide a sustainable high quality service for patients. The Modernisation of MMC stands for dumbing down and crushing high standards of medical training and working towards a useless competency based system that will allow anyone to have a crack at anything, I just hope the Health Committee have the honesty to describe MMC for the steaming turd that it is.
3 comments:
What a mazes me is how resilient MMC has been when you consider how truly broken this reform is.
At the front line, it's virtually impossible to find anyone who supports it and yet the damn thing persists like the weeds in my garden!
One year later and I'm still running around stressing about getting boxes filled in. It really spoils my overall enjoyment of the job.
Die MMC. Die!
Given the current climate of the attack on medicine and the professions, I wouldn't keep my hopes on this report up to be honest!
Garth,
Whilst I happen to agree with you on the MMC being an unmitigated disaster I would like to point out that what NuLabour have done to medicine has nothing to do with free market economics; what we see here (and what is the problem with the US) is pure old fashioned greed manifested through corporatism. Being a free-marketeer I would point out that professionalism is a more valuable commodity than throughput in nigh on all cases; especially when concerning the finite resource of a persons health.
The dumbing down of medicine is being achieved for what can only be described as fascism; the state in cahoots with big business have been bribed with after-MP job offers to pave the way for cheap, no-thrills access to NI contribution on which PAYMENT IS GUARANTEED IF YOU COLLECT A PAYSLIP - if treatment is substandard in a truly free market you can take your business elsewhere, codes of practice, professional review bodies and above-adequate training can be traded along with any other commodity; what Labour are palming off is third rate, degenerate Fascolist policy, creating maoist-like "country-doctors"; quacktitioners without the minerals to have made it into diagnostic medicine.
If you want to change the face of the NHS truly, smash it; form a cooperative NPO of doctors and charge a reasonable rate for treatment with impecable customer service; the NHS already has impecable customer service, except the MoH is mistakenly thought of as the customer. Offer a health plan and agree to tell it like it is, hold weekly MDTs to discuss patient care and pricing and issue bulletins to them; be liberal with your payment methods to make the rich pay more for silk sheets so the poor dont have to pay for cotton. Above all remind people that medicine is never free at the point of entry nor is it anything other than a luxury, but provide the luxury to as many people as you can.
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