David Penman, a consultant gynaecologist, has resigned from the NHS. He has written about it in an article in the Mail which unfortunately does not seem to be online.
Here are some extracts:
"I resigned from my post at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Kent days before I was due to attend an internal disciplinary hearing, held to discuss ann alleged breach of my employment code of conduct.
"My supposed crime did did not relate to any clinical matter or professional ineptitude.
"In the eyes of my accusers, I had committed the more serious offence of daring to speak publicly about the way I was being prevented from doing my job properly by the ridiculous decisions of hospital managers.
"Essentially, I had been told than many operations for patients on my waiting list were being postponed until the next financial year in order, it was claimed, to save money and meet government targets.
"I found this utterly absurd.
"I had the capacity to carry out the opreations but, thanks to some bureaucratic diktat, I had to sit around completing Sudoku puzzles rather than dealing with my patients.
"This is no way to run a health service in an advanced, wealthy country.
"The British public, which pays for the the NHS through an increasingly heavy burden of taxation, is not receiving the health care it deserves. Instead, it is subsidising a creaking edifice of statistical fraud, political dogma and over-mighty officialdom."
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"Anyone who has worked in the frontline knows that the system is failing badly."
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"This statistic-driven culture...meant that any service which did not have its targets set by central government would not be treated as a priority.
"As a result, it would be deprived of resources and staff. I saw this in my own department, the only specialist foetal unit in the area. But because we did not have targets, we were starved of funding and the service was run down."
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"My disenchantment came to a head at the end of last year when I found out that, as a result of Government guidelines on annual financial targets, the hospital had decided that all new routine outpatient cases had to wait a minimumn of nine weeks before being seen, while all routine surgical cases had to wait a minimum of 20 weeks.
"So even if we had the capacity, we were still not allowed to treat patients.
"The situation became even worse when I discovered in Feburary that managers were shifting my case into the next financial year so that the costs of their treatment would not be in the accounts for 2005-06.
"The idea that this would save any real money was ludicrous. All that this statistical maneoevring achived was to creat a backlog for April and May."
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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How detatched can an administration get?
Proof if ever there was to detach health provision from NI. This kind of joke would not occur, and even if it did at an individual hospital, then the NI could direct people elsewhere and starve the dysfunctional hospitals of 'custom'. Right now we have to pay with a gun against our head and are forced to endure local NHT incompetence. It is Communism, pure and simple, with New Labour moving rapidly towards finishing off the last part of the puzzle - enabling a clique of private companies to get profit while we are forced by law ot pay them. OBSCENE.
Posted by: Tim at June 9, 2006 10:06 AM