Wednesday 12 March 2008

Darzi's brave new medicine

It seems that as well as gifting millions to private health care corporations, polyclinics will also be used to dive down standards by creating yet another cohort of inadequately trained staff grade doctors. This new impersonal service that is being enforced by central government diktat is being revealed as a second rate service to our current setup.

Polyclinics will have only one properly trained General Practitioner, and the remainder of the doctors will be made up of 'career grades' who have not had the proper training in general practice to be let loose to work unsupervised. Undoubtedly these will be the doctors who are unfortunate enough not to have got proper GP training jobs or hospital training jobs, who have been forced into this unenviable position of working without being properly prepared by a government that is obsessed by bullying staff, rather than working with people in cooperation.

As Dr C points out, this is something that should not be brushed under the carpet, we should not be forced to keep quiet about the clear fact that many staff are being dangerously empowered way beyond their limited means. The great irony of all this is that Darzi's polyclinics are just another prong of the government's dumbing down fork, and this is while the DoH is claiming that they will revolutionise primary care. Darzi's dumbed down polyclinics will also be manipulated by various large corporations so that patients can be sold a load of useless alternative pap in the form of herbal medicines, homeopathic treatments et other bull. Even the right leaning Economist has come out strongly against Darzi's agenda for change, while the Witch doctor has noticed an excellent piece that decontructs the real motives behind these government reforms. So all in all, the DoH see progress as less access to properly trained staff and more access to useless alternative medicine, fantastic isn't it?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh dear, poor ickle doctors having to compete for jobs like everyone else. Whatever next, a free and open market place where you're worth is determined by the quality of your service? Perish the thought.

Garth Marenghi said...

Doctors have no problem with competition, however we do have a problem with services being dismantled, wrecked and dumbed down.

It's good for no one, and this is the point.

The 'free market' you talk of is also inherently flawed, as patients are often very unaware of what constitutes good medicine or treatment.

This is shown by the plethora of rubbish that is peddled by the alternative medicine industry, patients lap it up, but it is a load of rubbish, a la bottled water.

So when the free market is engineered to brainwash to but useless expensive products, it hardly results in progress, rather the exact opposite.

Would you want anyone to be able to do an operation on you or your child in the perfect 'free market'? hence the standard of the service could decide who went where?

what utter ideological cr*p