The introduction of mechanisms that mimic the market add unnecessary levels of bureaucracy.
The introduction of mechanisms that mimic the market add unnecessary levels of bureaucracy
The plan to pay GPs £55 for each patient they diagnose with dementia has rightly been condemned as ‘odious’: it’s a threat to the trust between patient and doctor. Patients will wonder whether the diagnosis they receive is coloured by the lure of extra cash, rather than clinical need.
But it also illustrates, very clearly, what’s wrong with our approach to the NHS, and many other public services today.
We’re taking a service that relies on professional skills, compassion, caring, and treating it as though it concerned the manufacture of widgets.
Performance-related pay, of which this is just a particularly gross example, might make some kind of sense in a factory, or at least one where each worker has the same tools and makes each item personally, but in the many other environments in which free market ideology has placed it, the effects are distorting, damaging, even disastrous. As of course it has been in our financial and commercial sectors, with their runaway bonus cultures.
We’re surely going to see more of this damage in the teaching profession this year, as performance-related pay continues to be introduced. Putting even more pressure on teachers to teach to the test and pitting them against each other will do little to give pupils a good, rounded education in a healthy environment. We know that only a team of teachers, assistants and support staff, working with the pupils themselves and parents and carers, can together give pupils the skills and knowledge they need.
We’ve already seen the impact of performance-related pay in the NHS, where the focus on financial targets at Staffordshire Hospital caused immense pain and suffering.
But there’s an even deeper problem which the £55 diagnosis fiasco exposes. That’s the market mechanism, competition instead of cooperation, being used as a way to manage and run the NHS.
That’s what Professor Allyson Pollock’s NHS Reinstatement Bill aims to tackle: to end the division between purchasing and private bodies, and to severely restrict the role of private companies in provision of NHS services. The Green Party is entirely committed to its central principles.
The Green Party says the profit motive has no place in healthcare, and the introduction of mechanisms that mimic the market have added unnecessary levels of bureaucracy, and acres of paperwork, to the costs of the NHS.
I was privileged to be able to join the People’s March for the NHS last month for a day. I heard from the healthcare workers who made up the majority of the marchers. They told me of the impact of NHS privatisation, the massive costs of Private Finance Initiative schemes that have done such damage to healthcare in so many areas, and the destructive effects of this government’s wholesale reorganisation of the NHS.
Not only are we handing over our facilities and services to multinational companies that come out of the disastrously poor and expensive American healthcare system, not only are we slashing funding for essential NHS services and imposing massive “efficiency savings” that began with Labour and have continued with this government, but we are imposing a costly, damaging market approach where it doesn’t belong.
Let’s hope this furore will help shine a light on the problem, and build support for the removal of market mechanisms from the management of the NHS.
Natalie Bennett is leader of the Green Party
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28 Responses to “GP dementia charging: the profit motive has no place in healthcare”
Mapesbury Green
However, people are living longer and as such more and more people are getting to the age where they will develop the condition. Clinical Commissioning Groups work by the profile of their areas on pure number crunching grounds. If only 25% of people with the condition are diagnosed within an area, then they are not going to allocate NHS resources to the appropriate support services to better help the 100% people who have the symptoms of diagnosis and their families.
The system is currently broken, but this is what people have to contend with.
“points mean prizes”
Mapesbury Green
With dementia, better to be ‘over diagnosed’ as you’ll have a pleasant surprise than miss out on support.
Andrew Wedgwood
I find it quite disgusting that someone could be paid more money if they finds he can decide more people they can diagnose with dementia. I go back all the time to the time honoured mechanism that one is paid to do the best you can at your job. Quality and pride in ones workmanship not quantity. As a young man if I worked too fast milling out piston rings on my lathe I’d make mistakes and the quality inspector would be talking to me about my substandard work. If he paid me more to work faster and never mind the quality then many engines would fail and the reputation of that firm would be affected and I might become unemployed if orders dried up.
Mapesbury Green
They should be privatised too as after all they are a public service, receiving public money.
Leon Wolfeson
People *were* living longer and longer. But anyway…
And there are answers other than this simplistic one of bribes. Moreover, you are making assumptions as to funding for support services, which can only be reduced (as new borrowing is out, remember?) by said bribes.