The first interviews by the Health Committee involved hearing some rather pathetic comments from the deputy CMO Martin Marshall; as he had to explain the reasons for railroading through MTAS 2007 against a massive majority of the medical profession:
Martin Marshall "On balance the benefits of continuing far outweighed the benefits of stopping the process"
( the benefits for the DoH that is)
When he was asked what the profession was saying at the time:
"There were a lot of letters, emails, blogs on websites that said that the process should be stopped, but I felt that the voice of those that felt it should continue was muted, particularly in the spring in the heat of the problems, their voice were expressed very strongly, by a lot of the candidates who had had interviews who wanted them to stand, by the service who didn't want a vacuum on August 1st, and by a lot educationalists as well"
Then when asked if there was an equal balance of people who wanted it scrapped and people who wanted it to continue?
"Not on volume, not on noise, certainly not, the people who wanted it stopped were making a much louder noise"
So then what was the justification for not listening to this noisy majority?
"It had to be a rational one, not one based on noise"
This sums up the contempt that the Department of Health routinely shows for the medical profession in trying to railroad through its unpopular and failing policy. It is hardly surprising that everything the DoH touches turns into manure, when they write us off as just 'noise'. If the majority of the medical profession are 'noise' then I would equate the efforts of Liam Donaldson and Martin Marshall to a gnawing 'sqeak' emitted from a dying rat. The recent Health Committee interviews with Crockard and Heard unveiled the fact that the MMC specialist training group contained zero, yes zero, people with a medical background.
We are being managed by buffoons. The health service cannot be adequately managed and run by people who have no understanding of medicine, the DoH are proof of this. Would it be acceptable if the Bank of England was run by people with no knowledge of economics and no background in finance? The DoH is even so foolish as to empower people with no medical degrees to diagnose and treat disease, this could only have come from people with no background in medicine. Negotiation with these fools is not productive, as they cannot detect sensible reasoned argument when it slaps them in the face. The police service has been treated with a similiar contempt by this government, and they have now realised that agitation and beyond is the only way ahead. How much longer must this go on before we do the same?
