Lansley and his lies: a tired corrupt joke

I recently took the time out to listen to a certain Andrew Lansley interviewed on Doctors.net.uk, unfortunately nothing surprised me. Lansley comes across as a slightly unpleasant and aggressive individual, he doesn't like having to answer questions, he seems to just assume that 'his change' is good change.

I was not impressed by several of Lansely's naive assumptions. He frequently talked of 'decreasing bureaucracy' but he was never adequately questioned on this. The reform is costing several billion in itself, while the reorganisation of PCTs into GP consortia hardly promised to do much to the size of the administrative layer. Lansley should have been asked why introducing a marketised system with a central regulator 'Monitor' will drive down the bureaucratic costs, all the evidence suggests that markets like this lead to more bureaucracy, not less.

One thing Lansley was also not adequately questioned on was emergency care at NHS hospitals. The current white paper is the thin end of the wedge, it's one thing for certain elective work to be farmed out to alternate providers, but the problem comes when hospitals start to lost bits of their services and are still expected to provide the unprofitable emergency services in areas such as surgery/medicine/obstetrics etc.

Lansley talks of commissioning leading to 'more integrated services'. Relating to emergency services as explained above, certain hospitals will start to lose various bits of their axial skeleton while still being expected to run at the same speed in providing decent emergency services. Lansley needed to be grilled and taken down on emergency services, 'the fragmentation' will destroy decent DGH emergency care, it is an inevitability. Emergency care is unprofitable and the private firms will not bid for this, the NHS will be left to pick up the pieces but they will have lost essential parts of themselves, it is a disaster waiting to happen.

'Not allowing cherry picking', ignoring the improving outcomes and patient satisfaction levels, there were just so many cases in the interview where Lansley ignored the point and just repeated the same old claptrap. Lansley got far too easy a ride, he was very rarely grilled, hardly ever picked up on his errors, barely interrupted. interesting how is links to Care UK were not questioned at all in this interview. Not impressive in my eyes.

For anyone else worried about the government's 'reform', have a look at this, the rewording of Clause 2 looks rather key:

"Clause (2) is the crucial one. Where the wording used to be ‘must’ (provide services etc…), with its attached duties, it is now ‘must act with a view’ (to provide services etc…).

Now, note the syntax. In the previous wordings, the compulsion created by the must was to ‘provide (services etc)’. In the proposed amendment, the compulsion created by the must is to ‘act (with a view etc)’. At a stroke, the Secretary of State’s duty to provide services has been transformed into a duty to ‘act with a view’ – and ‘acting with a view’ is most certainly not the same thing as providing a service. The ministerial duty has been removed."

Neither Lansley or his words impress me, he's like a tired broken record, his expensive creation of yet more bureaucracy in yet another corrupt politically motivated deckchair reorganisation is bound to fail patients.