NHS

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): A report from the Commons Welsh Affairs Committee looked at one of the most sensitive aspects of devolution this week, the impact on NHS services that have traditionally straddled the English/Welsh border.

As a consequence of the tensions over diverging funding regimes in Wales and England, evidence suggests that there is a perception that the English NHS is subsidising the Welsh NHS. Evidence also suggests that Welsh patients perceive that they are being treated as second-class citizens within the National Health Service. Both suggestions should be addressed immediately by the Department of Health, the Welsh ssembly Government and health service providers to ensure that patients receiving treatment on both sides of the Welsh-English border are treated fairly and equally, and that they believe this to be the case.

In evidence to the Committee, First Minister Rhodri Morgan explained why North Wales in particular is still heavily reliant on specialist services based in England:

The population of North Wales is one thirteenth of the population of the North-West of England, therefore the relationship with even the small/medium centres, like Chester, but certainly with Merseyside and Greater Manchester in the provision of health services is totally different from the relationship between South Wales, which as two million people, and the greater Bristol areas, which would also have about two million people.

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Seven years ago I sat on a radical commission into the future of the NHS with Will Hutton in the chair and alongside Allyson Pollock, Conor Gearty and others. We were very fearful for the prospects for what we saw as Britain’s “greatest and most prized institution”.

We believed that the market-driven mechanisms that the government was introducing, and the restless demand for change after change, was destroying both the universalist ethic of the service and the morale of the people who worked in it. We found that the service was virtually unaccountable at all levels, from its national direction down to complaints and redress at patient level. Our main recommendation was that the government should consult widely over writing an NHS constitution that protected its founding principle – that people should have “access to free medical treatment at the time of need".

Rupert Read reviews NHS plc by Allyson Pollock.

This book exposes the terrible damage being done to the NHS by New Labour's addiction to privatization.

Neal Lawson (London, Compass): Too often those who want to see a new democratic settlement talk in abstracts, and making it easy for our opponents to write us off as merely ‘the chattering classes'. While we zip up our anoraks, they get on with the ‘real business' of running the country.

So it's helpful when we stumble into practical issues and debates about everyday political issues that support the cause of democracy. This is what I did when I started to research a pamphlet for Compass on the future of the NHS. Naively, I started out with a plan to write a blueprint by the tried and tested method of talking to all the biggest brains in the sector, and then put it together as a winning hand on how the left should run health services.

Stuart Weir & Andrew Blick (Cambridge & London, Democratic Audit): Lawyers have joined judges as scapegoats for politicians who wish to protect either themselves or the state from being made answerable to people whom they abuse or neglect. In an interview with Society Guardian today, health secretary Alan Johnson said Gordon Brown's plans for an NHS constitution should not be enshrined in legislation. Why not?  Because if patients got statutory rights, they might seek to uphold them in the courts. He explained, "I don't want the constitution to give lots of work for the lawyers so that the NHS spends more time in court and less on treating people."  Duh!  He is obviously unaware of the importance of rights under the Human Rights Act that organisations like the British Institute for Human Rights have used to obtain decent treatment for vulnerable people in care homes and the like, without necessarily employing lawyers or taking cases to court.

Jon Bright (London, OK): Hearing yesterday's news of wide ranging plans to increase screening on the NHS to turn it into a 'preventative' rather than 'curative' health service, I couldn't help but be reminded of the following Solzhenitsyn quote. I will leave you the fairly easy task of guessing who the quote is about (let's just say it wasn't Mr. Bean):

Jon Bright (London, OK): Gill Morgan, Chief Exec of the NHS confederation, has said that Britain now effectively has 'four NHS' systems. She's even described their different characteristics, summarised in this Beeb table:

England - NHS market created whereby hospitals and community services have to compete with the private sector for patients, resulting in big falls in waiting times

Michael Rustin (London, Soundings): Unfortunately, there are problems in the exercise of power by government in Britain beyond the infringements of human rights and individual liberties cited by the critics of Polly Toynbee’s pro-state position.