Labour's Health reforms have put NHS on the critical list!

No-one can be in any doubt that the Government’s health reforms are in a mess, when we face the prospect of doctors on the dole.

Over 6,000 fully-trained doctors cannot find positions, and every vacancy has hundreds of applicants. To make matters worse, the new IT system brought in to manage applications for medical posts keeps crashing. 

It’s not just unemployed doctors. While there are waiting lists for speech therapy and physiotherapy, Britain now has thousands of therapists trained at graduate level who cannot find jobs. Newly qualified nurses, radiographers and midwives are in the same boat.

This is a story of waste and mismanagement on a massive scale – plus the missed opportunity to improve local health services and patient care.

It costs the NHS £250,000 to train a doctor not to mention the estimated £50,000 debt individuals run up over ten years of training. According to the British Medical Association, many doctors are going abroad. The BMA estimates the medical “brain drain” may have cost the UK taxpayer £1.4 billion. Australia is reported to be particularly pleased.

So how has the Government managed to conjure up unemployed highly-trained staff with massive NHS deficits, as Kingston’s Primary Care Trust is battling with?

Mainly because it runs the whole NHS from Whitehall, responding to whims of Ministers desperate to capture headlines. Instead of financial planning and staff demands responding to local needs, aggregated up where necessary, the Government have opted for a top-down, command and control approach.

I’m determined that our local campaign against health cuts in Kingston will be part of a national voice of protest against this Government’s NHS failures.