News from the New Party

A monument to fear

There’s a department called the [Department of Health] that even a recent Cabinet Office report describes as completely lacking direction, and a body formerly known as the NHS Modernisation Agency, now known as the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, that should have been all over this. Karen Taylor, Director of Value for Money Studies in health at the NAO, says this is a huge problem, which runs deep into the heart of NHS organisations. There is such rigidity, such a culture of compliance, that finding examples of the dissemination and uptake of best practice is very much the exception rather than the rule.

But equally problematic according to Mr. Petri, are the consultants themselves - none of his colleagues, even at in his own Foundation Trust, were interested in taking up his new technique. For one, there’s no real means of making them change. Consultants work in parallel to each other, there’s no-one really managing them and there’s no common goal. A genuine partnership between management, consultants, and nurses is urgently needed.

But the real issue is they don’t want to change - and here’s where a taboo has to be broken. The patient’s interest in having their operation done as fast as possible, is not necessarily the consultant’s - at least on the NHS. Consultants have earned huge sums of money out of waiting list inefficiencies, through patients that are willing and able to pay the money to go private - and they pay 4 or 5 times as much as in France according to Mr. Petri. If waiting lists (and times) are cut, then this lucrative stream of income for consultants is also cut - indeed Mr. Petri reports that his private income has been chopped in half by the fact his ‘dual-surgery’ technique has eliminated his waiting lists. Clearly there’s a massive conflict of interests.