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Multi-national health and the profits of doom
• YOUR editorial rightly highlights the dangers of allowing multi-national corporations to take over NHS GP practices (Profits of doom: NHS ‘gone within 10 years’, January 31).
The government has been duplicitous about the privatisation of primary care.
When the involvement of private companies was first discussed the excuse for this was that some areas of the country could not attract enough GPs and thus needed help from the private sector.
But what we are seeing now is the awarding of contracts to multi-national corporations despite bids from local GPs.
These decisions seem to have been made on purely economic grounds.
The multi-nationals are understandably very keen to get their hands on GP practices because this will put them in charge of the money used to commission the vast majority of patient care.
They can then, of course, buy that care wherever they like, including the private sector!
It’s like giving children the free run of the sweet shop.
Traditional GPs provide continuity of care, and have a long-term interest in the communities they serve.
Multi-nationals have a first duty to their shareholders and in that climate patients become a commodity.
High-risk patients such as those with complex or long-term conditions may find themselves out in the cold. Ask any diabetic patient in the US how difficult it is to get registered with a GP.
The government has already squandered vast sums of money on getting the private sector involved in hospital care, saddling hospitals with financially crippling PFI programmes, imposing unwanted private treatment centres which have been poor value for money, outsourcing large amounts of imaging which could have been done better and more cheaply by the NHS.
Now it seems determined to begin the destruction of primary care.
Patients and the public can and should challenge this, through overview and scrutiny committees and through local democratic structures. Join Keep Our NHS Public and keep up the pressure for public accountability and a publicly-funded and delivered NHS.
DR Jacky Davis
Co-chair NHS
Consultants Association, NW5
Sorted!
• SOME years go I watched a television programme where an astounded Tony Blair was confronted with the news that it took two days to get an appointment with a doctor.
“What? I’ll get that sorted” said Mr Blair.
I have just collected my usual 13-week prescription from the Abbey Medical Centre, where I am a patient, and I have discovered that a certain medicine has been removed from the list. Naturally, I am concerned. One reads about the effects of statins etc.
I attempted to book to see a doctor (any) on January 29 – and was told the earliest appointment was February 8.
What can I say?
Tony and Gordon and the rest of them certainly have got it sorted. Now it takes 10 days not two!
I am a left-alone-do-it-all-yourself 76-year-old man.
Ain’t life grand.
Eric Smith
Address supplied
Keep NHS for us all
• YOUR article about the “sell-out” of three Camden surgeries to an American company (Here come the ‘sicko’ surgeries, January 31) is, to say the least, a classic example of how anxious the government is to “sell off the family jewellery”.
And at that, to an American private, profit-making company.
This gross betrayal by the primary care trust to give away, to the lowest bidder, a sizeable chunk of our local health services is surely against the wishes, not to say, the requirements, of the patients.
Those poor people will, in the fullness of time, almost certainly be faced with the situation that prevails in America, where one has to be extremely wealthy to be unwell.
We are entitled to a fairer deal.
Do not interfere with our health care that, with all its faults is probably still one of the best in the world.
We need a service that is controlled by ourselves.
Stanley Freed
address supplied
US better
• I HOPE Frank Dobson will read my letter as regards to his comment about the United States health system that it is a mess (Here come the ‘sicko’ surgeries, January 31).
I beg to differ having relatives living in the US. They are so much more into preventive health checks.
Unlike here, if you go to the doctor with a small skin mole or wart, in the USA, they examine your whole body, unlike here, where they just treat the existing mole.
I know only too well about prevention. My dear husband had been an out-patient for tests in the past eight months for an ongoing cough and slight chest pains.
They were looking at an old lung problem but in fact he collapsed and died on December 29 2007 very suddenly.
And the post-mortem showed death was due to coronary arteries blocked. If discovered earlier, his death may have been prevented with a stent or bypass surgery, and in the US these tests are common procedures for such problems.
Name and address supplied
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