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medpundit |
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Monday, May 13, 2002"Doctors' leaders called on the government yesterday to free the NHS from the "shackles" of performance targets which distorted clinical decisions and forced them to give the longest waiters priority over the sickest patients. Ian Bogle, chairman of the British Medical Association, said doctors feared being made the scapegoats for any failure to meet the scores of targets being imposed by ministers to reduce waiting times and improve services to patients. "The professionals are sick to death of being shackled in this way and having their feelings about clinical priorities overridden by government targets," he said after the BMA council's first discussion of the extra 40bn pounds of NHS spending promised by the chancellor in the Budget. "They have got to unshackle the NHS and set it free ... The professionals should decide without always having a government target from Whitehall skewing what they are doing locally." Dr Bogle said there was mounting concern that doctors were doing more low priority work at the expense of patients suffering pain and disability." Whenever I read stories like this I thank God we don't have a national health care system. Trying to work under Medicare and the corporate-socialist model is bad enough, but having a system completely controlled by politicians must be horrible. Even in our system, politicians can't resist meddling with medical decisions. Witness the recent mammogram controversy. posted by Sydney on 5/13/2002 08:02:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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