Tony Blair and his colleagues are systematically 
undermining the NHS. The following story, 
published in the BMJ and also in The Guardian, 
illustrates the deep inroads that the private 
sector is being actively encouraged to make into 
the NHS. As Narath's electronic response to the 
BMJ article demonstrates (see BMJ website), 
Blair's actions will damage UK health care. They 
will also irreversibly underminine the 
egalitarian and caring culture of the NHS which 
we so value and which to some extent still 
exists, scarred by the excesses of Thatcher and 
wounded by those of Blair and his fellow 
'Christian Democrats'

               ***********************
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7399/1106-d#responses

Blair says whole of NHS should be opened up to 
competition 
London: Anne Gulland 

Prime Minister Tony Blair told a meeting of 
private healthcare executives that he wanted to 
open the whole of the NHS to outside competition. 

Mr Blair met managers from private US, European, 
and South African companies bidding to run 11 
diagnostic and treatment centres, which will 
perform operations in specialties that have the 
highest waiting times—such as knee, hip, and 
cataract surgery. 

According to a report in the Guardian (14 May, p 
11), Mr Blair said: "We are anxious to ensure 
that this is the start of opening up the whole of 
the NHS supply system so that we end up with a 
situation where the state is the enabler, it is 
the regulator, but it is not always the 
provider." 

A spokeswoman from the Department of Health 
confirmed that Mr Blair met the private sector 
providers as well as some senior NHS managers. 
She said that linking up with the private sector 
was part of the government’s wider NHS reform 
programme. 

One of the companies attending the meeting was 
the private finance initiative provider Jarvis, 
which has teamed up with a Canadian hospital 
operator. 

A Jarvis spokesman confirmed that the company was 
keen to get more involved in the health sector 
through its healthcare arm. 

He said: "We have linked up with Interhealth 
Canada to bid for some of these DTCs [diagnostic 
and treatment centres]. We certainly see health 
care as an expanding market and we’re certainly 
looking at being more involved, particularly in 
primary health care." 

The BMA welcomes the centres but has concerns 
that junior doctors could miss out on important 
aspects of their training if they do not see a 
full range of patients. The private companies 
said they would bring their own staff with them. 

Nigel Edwards, policy director at the NHS 
Confederation, said that the private sector 
already played a significant role in mental 
health and continuing care of older people, which 
has been "effectively privatised." He added that 
opening up general practice and chronic disease 
management to private competition was not far 
behind. 

He said: "You cannot apply the lessons of 
elective surgery to chronic disease management or 
general practice. It’s a far more complicated 
issue than that. It’s astonishing that all the 
discussions have been around foundation trust 
status, which is a bureaucratic tweak of how a 
hospital is governed, compared with this, which 
is a significant change. It you were a conspiracy 
theorist you might think the government had 
successfully managed to divert the debate away 
from this." 

In total, there will be 46 diagnostic and 
treatment centres run by the NHS, 11 by the 
independent sector, and eight run jointly by the 
NHS and the independent sector. The Department of 
Health hopes that the centres will do 39 500 
operations a year by 2005, treating an extra 54 
000 patients a year.