NHS England Medical Director Keogh has announced that hospitals are to be forced to change the consultant contract and institute so-called ‘seven day working’ of consultants.
The plan, unveiled in an exclusive interview in the Sunday Times, involves forcing consultants to do elective routine work on Saturdays and Sundays after tearing up the 2004 consultants contract.
This is be forced through by imposing massive sanctions on hospitals including a 2.5 per cent income cut and the threat of the removal of their junior doctors, if there is non compliance.
Changes to the contracts of back-up paramedics would also be forced through.
The implication of this plan are historic.
It spells the end of the one-to-one consultant to patient relationship, which has been the bedrock of the NHS for 65 years, which has served patients so well.
Patients are to be handed over from team to team with no continuing responsibility, beyond seven days.
Keogh claimed: ‘We have hospitals that function four and a half or five days a week and we have the cost of keeping the operating theatres, outpatient clinics, expensive diagnostic equipment maintained over the weekend.’
He said: ‘We have got to get the same amount of activity concentrated on less real estate and resource.’
Last December Keogh said that hospitals should run ‘efficiently’, like Tesco, with the implication that profits must be made.
This policy is misleadingly being ‘sold’ under the guise of saving lives at weekends and improving emergency care.
The reality is theatre space is hard fought over at night and at weekends in District General Hospitals, as different emergency teams vie to get their patients in.
On the present contract, hospital consultants have to live within a 30 minutes drive to their hospital, so that any emergency can be assessed in just half an hour.
Junior doctors are at present in hospitals round the clock, despite repeated attempts by government to deplete their numbers and presence.
Also provided on weekends by on call staff is pathology back up, such as cross matching blood and X-ray and scans as required.
What lies behind this massive propaganda campaign is the underlying drive to bankrupt and close the remaining District General Hospitals (DGHs).
Faced with these new so called ‘clinical standards’, policed by huge financial sanctions, and the loss of their junior doctors, DGHs will be deemed financially failing and be closed.
Ripping up the consultants’ 2004 contract is an essential part of the government’s plan to privatise the NHS.
Commercial companies cannot make money on running hospitals if they are not doing routine elective work and minor surgery seven days a week, including after hours and at weekends.
Keogh and NHS Employers chief executive Royles, want consultants in hospitals after hours and at weekends doing routine operations, lists of hernias and routine scans and tests etc for basic rates, in order to make hospitals more profitable for prospective Tesco type owners or contractors.
