RESEARCH conducted by the medical magazine Pulse has uncovered the fact that local GP practices are being offered bribes of thousands of pounds to cut the number of patients they refer to hospitals.
According to the research, GPs are being paid anything up to £11,000 to cut back on hospital referrals and follow-ups – including two-week cancer waits and emergency admissions. This simply amounts to bribes being handed out to cut back on the expense of sending people to hospital despite any medical consideration.
The money is being offered by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), the bodies set up by the Tory-led coalition in 2012 and given the responsibility of planning and commissioning health care in local areas. On paper, these CCGs have a legal responsibility to ‘support quality improvements in general practices’ and drive forward changes in health provision locally.
The Pulse investigation has shown exactly what quality improvements and changes these CCGs, acting as agents for the government’s NHS England, are really trying to drive forward – cuts that ignore the health requirements of the most desperately sick in order to save money. In nine parts of England, CCGs were offering financial ‘incentives’ to GP practices to cut hospital referrals.
The NHS North-East Lincolnshire CCG is offering the average practice the equivalent of more than £6,000 to reduce outpatient referrals, including two-week urgent cancer referrals, to the same level as the 25 per cent of practices with the lowest referral rates in 2014-15. NHS Birmingham South Central is promising £11,000 to any GP practice that reduces outpatient attendance, hospital follow-ups, A&E attendances and emergency admissions by 1% compared to its figures for 2014.
In London, at least six CCGs are offering similar ‘incentives’ to cut referrals.
The inclusion of cancer referrals flies completely in the face of all medical advice that immediate referral for suspected cancer patients is absolutely vital; indeed GPs are encouraged to refer suspected sufferers as soon as possible in an attempt to bring down the extremely high rate of cancer deaths in England – one of the highest in Europe.
None of this matters to the Tories, who are determined to cut NHS funding to the bone regardless of the cost in human life. This latest ploy to cut funding is another front in the ongoing Tory war against every aspect of the NHS, which the government is insisting must make cuts of £22 billion in the next few years.
It is part and parcel of the attack on hospitals, where wards and entire hospitals are being closed, and upon the pay and conditions of NHS staff. But the drive to smash up the NHS and open it up to wholesale privatisation is meeting determined resistance from NHS staff and the entire working class.
Junior doctors are in open rebellion over the attempt to force on them new contracts that coerce them into working 90 hours a week while at the same time cutting their pay by 30%, a contract that will have the inevitable effect of damaging patient safety as these doctors are worked into the ground. These contracts for junior doctors are just the start of a campaign to impose similar contracts throughout the NHS.
Determined to fight this imposition, the BMA Junior Doctors Committee has called for a ballot for industrial action to defeat the Tory plans, along with a mass demonstration in London on October 17.
These doctors are showing the way for the entire working class. No amount of pleading with the Tories is going to stop them smashing up the NHS and privatising it out of existence in order to provide the money needed to pay off the bankers’ debts.
All the crawling to the Tory party conference on Sunday by the TUC will not make the slightest difference; the NHS can only be protected by the working class coming out behind the junior doctors in a general strike to bring down the government and replace it with a workers government and socialism.
All those TUC leaders who refuse to call such action must be removed and replaced with a leadership that will fight.
