NHS Poor Service For The Poor Must Be Avoided, UK

Editor's Choice
Academic Journal
Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 23 Feb 2012 - 8:00 PST


This week it was revealed in the UK's House of Commons that an NHS Director has written to Professor John Ashton, an NHS employee, formerly North West Regional Director of Public Health, stating that it was "inappropriate" Ashton signed a letter underlining his personal worries regarding the Government's Health and Social Care Bill. Ashton was called to attend a meeting with NHS managers to explain and account for his actions.

Professor Ashton continues to disagree and raises his concerns regarding the Bill in a report published Online First in The Lancet. According to Ashton, the Health and Social Care Bill signifies the start of a return to an insurance-based system that will re-form the divide between the "undeserving poor" who will be assigned to the underfunded Poor Law Hospitals, and individuals who can afford to go to voluntary hospitals, although this time all under one roof.

Ashton explains:

"One of the frightening aspects of the current UK Government's policies is the apparent ignorance of ministers and civil servants not only of their own history, but of the body of evidence that until so recently informed social policy in this area. Nobody should be allowed to dismantle the NHS is they have not read, understood, and digested the writings of Richard Titmuss and his colleagues."

Ashton continues:

"The Poor Law concept of the deserving and undeserving poor is alive and well, and living in 10 Downing Street and Richmond House. These ideas are sitting comfortably alongside the Orwellian doublespeak of the New Localism, at the same time as the UK's rich tradition of local public health is being nationalized and centralized. Although there is a commitment to reducing inequalities in health, a whole raft of Coalition Government policies is taking us in the opposite direction."

Ashton cautions:

"Mass circulation newspapers feed hostile and negative propaganda in defiance of the facts about public services in general and the health services in particular, softening both them and the public up for carpet-bagging private organizations to move in to cream off profitable short term opportunities, leaving the costly areas of obstetrics, accident and emergency, psychiatry, care of the elderly not to mention high-end, innovative surgery - to residual state provision, with massive increases in transaction costs en passant."

He concludes:

"At a time when the NHS has never been more popular and when there is increasing evidence of its cost effectiveness, we are sleep-walking into its destruction...It is time to rise up and defend an institution that was built by our parents and our grandparents and which we owe to our children and grandchildren to maintain and pass on to them and to their guardianship."

Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton, said:

"Professor Ashton is a highly respected public health leader in Britain. He has made extraordinary contributions to this country's public health. Instead of silencing him and threatening him with disciplinary action, NHS managers and ministers should be listening carefully to his concerns.

Every health professional has a duty of care to patients and the public. The notion that raising legitimate questions about the adverse impact of this Government's health reforms can be punished sends a chilling signal about the kind of NHS this government wishes to create."

Written by Grace Rattue
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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