The ferret fancier

Lansley on the run - write to your President now!

2012-01-21T23:03:00.006Z

Lansley's disastrous Bill appears to drifting towards the rocks, the BMA, RCN, RCM, Unison and Unite already oppose the Bill. The Colleges are not covering themselves in glory with their failure to oppose the Bill.Now is the time for them to stand up, be counted and represent their members and the people of this country by openly stating their opposition to this destructive and incoherent Bill

Lansleys lies some more

2012-01-20T18:34:00.002Z

So Lansley is now claiming that nurses' and doctors' unions are opposing the health bill because of pay and pensions, what an illogical and incoherent view from this cockroach of a man.The pension reform is part of the package that is the whole scale privatisation of the NHS, the white paper and the pension reform are all part of this antidemocratic privatisation campaign. The pension

Quackery of the lowest form possible - exploiting dying cancer patients

2011-12-24T10:50:00.007Z

Exploiting those who are dying of cancer for their very last pennies is one of the most contemptible and disgraceful things humanly possible, yet it does not appear to be stopping some 'cancer experts'. The story is of a poor chap with end stage metastatic lung cancer:"The first of these people is the proprietor of Cancer Options. Cancer Options is a private consultancy offering advice to

Bevan's run - Save the NHS from Lansley!

2011-12-16T19:12:00.003Z

The government's health bill is an absolute disaster waiting to happen, of course it is not anything completely new, it is a continuation of the destructive market based reforms that have been going since the days of Maggie Thatcher. Having said that though, Lansley's terrible paper is a rather rapid turn along this road of doom. The media haven't really explained things properly to the public.

The NHS is in utter crisis - Trauma disaster

2011-12-01T21:50:00.001Z

The way trauma care is handled in the UK is in the process of being centralised. This means that a small number of more specialist centres are meant to be taking a far larger proportion of the workload in order to improve the patient outcomes. That is the theory anyway. Now for the reality. The government is starving the NHS of cash and despite the current service reconfigurations the so

Support the pension strike

2011-11-28T22:21:00.001Z

A lot of government misinformation has been and will be spread as the public sector unions' strike arrives this Wednesday. The simple fact is that the government is using the recession as an excuse to dishonestly shaft millions of public sector workers. Everyone should get behind the workers. The BMA are to ballot members on potential action soon and many of us think more could have been done

Dr Rant rises above the storm

2011-11-23T21:00:00.001Z

Dr Rant is back and has had some fairly interesting things to say on recent events: "For Christ's sake people! GP commissioning is being taken off GPs and given to private companies to do the rationing, right under out noses!! This policy isn't even a 'Tory' policy - it's just plain fucking evil." This is a very good point. Petty niggling in the playground should be left precisely where it

Someone doth protest too much?

2011-11-22T20:41:00.001Z

The ferretfancier does not wish to defame or incite hatred. Obviously there has been a bit of medical storm brewing in the last few days and I only think it right that my readers are pointed in the direction of the information so that they can make their own minds up. Dr Zorro and Dr No have some rather interesting tales to tell. Una Coales has her side of the story. Dr No's eloquent and

The GMC, the social media and our lives

2011-11-19T10:29:00.001Z

It seems that the social media is an area of great fear and concern for many of us in the medical blogosphere these days. With Dr Rant being take offline and in a state of deep paranoia, I decided to look through the BMA's guidance on the social media. There are many obvious pieces of advice. 'Patient confidentiality' is key, personally I have never spoken of anything patient-related that has

The GMC: a totalitarian regime?

2011-11-18T18:12:00.001Z

Much bad in medicine in recent years has been allowed to happen because those in the positions of medical power have been looking out for themselves rather than the interests of doctors, the NHS and patients in general. It is also true that much progress is stifled because certain vested interests at the top of politics, medicine and medical politics just wanted to serve themselves and will do

Corrupt Bill edges through Lords

2011-10-12T18:23:00.002+01:00

So as expected the Health Bill has won two crucial votes in the House of Lords today. One would think that large numbers of those voting in the Lords would be objective and making a decision based on the evidence. Unfortunately this is not the case, this Mirror piece today makes it rather clear that large numbers of Lords have rather significant conflicts of interest in this regard. The BBC

#Blockthebill and corrupt media

2011-10-09T17:44:00.002+01:00

A mass protest is currently taking place on Westminster Bridge in London. UKUncut has organised this protest against the corrupt and dishonest health Bill that is currently being railroaded through by the coalition government. The reasons for this protest are the same old reasons that we all have in opposing this dreadful destructive piece of legislation. The public and the NHS staff are

Letter to the Lords

2011-10-09T09:11:00.002+01:00

I have taken the liberty of repeating this letter than Dr Grumble has recently reproduced on his blog. I would strongly urge anyone to sign up, time is fast running out: "As doctors in England, we are writing to you to express our conviction that the Health and Social Care Bill will irreparably undermine the most important and admirable principles of the National Health Service, and to

The Bill of disgrace

2011-10-08T13:36:00.002+01:00

I must apologise for my absence from the blogosphere over recent months, it has certainly been a strange old time in the NHS. The health news has been dominated by the Health Bill but the word 'dominated' doesn't really express the fact that the media have not covered this issue well or objectively in my opinion.The bias and lack of objectivity in the media as regards health as been demonstrated

Infection control madness

2011-05-21T09:17:00.001+01:00

Dishonest manager-led patient torture

2011-04-05T21:36:00.004+01:00

This current news story is old news, the sad thing is that this shocking treatment of patients has been going on for years now and it is completely evidence free and dishonest. Patients are being left in severe pain as their local managers are stopping their local surgeons carrying out joint replacement surgery which is the best evidence based treatment of their painful condition. Stupid managers

Lansley and his lies: a tired corrupt joke

2011-03-24T15:44:00.003Z

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

The 'principles' and the lies

2011-03-17T11:44:00.004Z

It is quite astonishing what lies are being told as the government tries to railroad through it's destructive health white paper. As always with rubbish corrupt policy, the 'principles' behind it are the common defence used, irrelevant of the fact that the actual reforms will do nothing to to respect or even live up to the so called sham of the 'principles'.We saw the same with MMC (Modernising

BMJ bias: the sorry Needham saga

2011-03-07T17:40:00.003Z

The following letter has been signed by a number of doctors and sent to the BMJ, the author has sent it on to me to publish here just in case the BMJ decide not to stick it up on their website. It focuses on the BMJ's strange decision to give Gillian Needham a free shot of self justification the other week. The BMA has subsequently published only a small percentage of the rapid responses on

Bravo Baroness!

2011-03-02T19:51:00.003Z

I must apologise for being so lazy with this little blogging effort. I stumbled upon this blogging piece which links in two excellent pieces of opinion the government's disastrous White Paper. The Baroness's excellent piece has been repeated here:"I can’t support the coalition plan for the NHSby Liberal Democrat Peer, Baroness Williams of Crosby Some of the health service reforms are valuable

Politicians and managers expect NHS silver service

2011-02-24T20:32:00.004Z

One thing that I have noticed as a bit of a recurrent theme during my time in the NHS has been the way that politicians and NHS managers expect to be treated like private patients on the NHS, they do not tolerate the treatment that normal 'mere mortal' patients receive, they insist on being treated differently, they want to be shunted ahead of the others, they do not want to ever wait for

Scottygate revisited - Needham shoots herself in foot

2011-02-14T11:57:00.002Z