Managers and the pathetic HSJ

If the public based their opinion of doctors on the picture painted by the media and not on their actual first and second hand experience of doctors then they would hold us all in incredibly low regard. Fortunately the vast majority of the public are much cleverer than the media give them credit for, doctors routinely do pretty well in various surveys of public opinion and levels of trust.

As Dr Grumble remarks, if one reads the Health Service Journal (HSJ) then one would think that doctors are evil blood sucking scum and that managers are lovely good willed angels. In fact the HSJ is not really a journal, it produces nothing of any quality, it is generally a magazine of selected opinion and discussion, one could almost go so far as to say it is a piece of propaganda, in fact I will. Compare the woeful HSJ to the journal of the British Medical Association, the BMJ, the BMJ is never so flagrantly partisan, it is never so overtly biased, it produces some decent balanced articles and some decent research, it might not be the New England Journal but it is reasonable.

The HSJ is an embarrassment, it is a Heat magazine style production, there is rarely anything of any substance in it, one will not find decent researched evidence used in any discussion or opinion pieces, one just gets baseless speculation and ideology. The Jobbing Doctor has exposed this with help of the excellent Clive Peedell. The likes of the HSJ fail to show any kind of objectivity in covering all matters health related, whether it be the government's complete mismanagement of GP Out of Hours care or the Consultant contract, you can be sure that only one warped side of the story will be spun.

In fact the government and the managers are the main two groups of people who routinely ignore the clinical needs of patients, they merely care for their own jobs and livelihoods, therefore spinning about their own success is all that matters, they would rather have a service that looks good on paper which lets patients down than an excellent service that doesn't look quite so perfect on paper. These two groups are strangely quiet when it comes to the selling off of the NHS to Richard Branson, Boots et al, it doesn't take a genius to see who this lot are looking out for and it ain't the patients.