Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramrod
Ok, how about the editor of the Lancet?
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I am sure that it is easy to trawl around and find many arguments both for and against but my response was due to reading the article that was in your link.
The article was articulate, very persuasive, logical and ticked all the right emotive boxes. However it struck me as being just too much like a party political broadcast and once I took the trouble to find who and what the author actually was, a party political broadcast it was but without an inquisitive mind one would never have known.
There is a massive information gap between what the public are told and the reality of any given situation. I am reliably informed by an insider that morale within hospital practitioners is falling rapidly especially with younger medics as their older counterparts look to negotiate deals to leave via the exit door into early retirement.
GP's are a separate entity but within hospitals cost and efficiency measures are in many cases driving practitioners to to a level of increasing despair not only for what is expected of them but whether they can safely pursue their duty of care within time constraints.
Many of the professional grade practitioners within the hospital sector of the NHS are subject to the old civil service type incremental ladder form of pay enhancement upon promotion. It is not unusual that many years can pass within a grade to move up the incremental ladder during which time the same responsibilities were accepted on day one as sometimes a decade later when pay has increased by many thousands due to nothing more than the passage of time. That form of averaging plays havoc with any pension deal which is not final pay orientated.
On the basis of international standards our doctors\consultants are not overly well paid but the package they had with ultra good pensions went a long way towards ameliorating a not so brilliant working lifetime income. Interference with the package will almost certainly see some going abroad and others looking towards the private sector as many GP's do already.
I see that many people state that along the lines of we are all in this together that cuts should be accepted for what we cannot afford. I wonder if what we cannot afford, we cannot afford to be without because I honestly think that before too many years have passed what we knew as the NHS will be a shadow of what it was.
I was not that long ago that people fed up with the agony of waiting two years for a hip replaced paid from their own resources. I wonder how long it will be before that situation returns and if it does will it be the thin end of the wedge. The decline of NHS dentistry did not happen overnight but it's path of decline was hastened with changes of remuneration to practitioners.