THE Brown government has bullied NHS GPs in the most brutal and cowardly fashion, and has given them an offer that they could not refuse as far as extending their hours is concerned, unless they took industrial action that would see millions of people go without GP care.
The BMA’s GP Committee (GPC) was forced into a position where it had to meet to discuss which of the two options given to them by Labour was the lesser evil, that would do the NHS and their patients the least harm.
The GPC came to the conclusion ‘that Option A1 is less damaging for general practice, because the alternative option will harm the underlying fabric of NHS general practice and patient care more quickly and more lastingly’.
Before the decision of the GPC, Chairman of the BMA’s GPs Committee Dr Laurence Buckman commented: ‘GPs have been put in an impossible position and will have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives.
He added: ‘The two deals on the table from the government haven’t been negotiated, they are inflexible and do not take into account the differing needs of populations around the UK. It’s this method of “negotiation” that has angered GPs. . .’
In fact, the forced changes in a negotiated and balloted for contract are just one prong of the deadly attack that is being mounted on GP practices, their patients and the NHS.
The other prong is the privatisation drive, where well-established and highly respected GPs are being turned down as the managers of new practices which are being handed over to private medical companies such as Atos Healthcare, in order to make a profit.
Atos Healthcare was recently awarded a 10-year contract in Bow despite the fact that local GPs, with years of experience of providing healthcare in Tower Hamlets, were prepared to take it on.
GPs and local residents are pointing out that an Atos take-over is the beginning of the slippery slope to privatised health care in Tower Hamlets.
Tower Hamlets council and the Primary Care Trust now want to hand GP services over to the private sector.
Councils across east and north London are following their lead. In Camden, three practices have already been handed over to the US privateer United Healthcare.
The government master-plan aims to see almost one in four of the Tower Hamlets population relying on privately provided primary health care.
It is a fact that GP surgeries run by private, profit-making companies could only work if they provided care on the ‘cheap’.
It is a fact that all the new private practices will be employing their own staff, setting their own terms and conditions of service, and will all be in competition with each other to maximise profits.
This is to be ‘marketplace medicine’ where private practices are given the budgets to buy and sell your healthcare for their profit.
Virgin, and Boots have already announced that they intend to enter this field of profit making.
That Labour is privatising the NHS is obvious.
In Secondary Care, District General Hospitals are to be shut and be replaced by privately owned or run polyclinics.
In the field of Primary Care, privately owned and run surgeries are to become the rule.
The BMA and the nursing trade union, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), are part of the ‘NHS Together’ coalition which contains the most powerful trade unions in the UK, allegedly for the purpose of defending the NHS.
GPs would have great difficulty taking strike action, but trade unions that say they are serious about defending the NHS have no excuse – they must take strike action. The BMA and the RCN must go to ‘NHS Together’ and the TUC and demand that they organise a one-day general strike to defend the NHS, and to serve notice that they will go as far as bringing down the Brown government to bring in a workers’ government to defend the NHS and halt privatisation.
