Tell patients the truth

Released 29/06/2010

BMA chairman calls for greater transparency in the NHS

BMA chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum urged the healthcare sector to be more honest to patients in his opening speech yesterday at the association's annual conference in Brighton.

In his keynote address to around 500 UK doctors, Dr Meldrum called for increased involvement of the public in NHS plans. "We can't go on pretending to patients that the resources are there to do everything, when they obviously aren't," he said. "We have to be honest with the public and involve them, much more than we currently do, in the decisions about the future direction of their NHS. It's time for change."

The government recently announced that it will be seeking the public's views on how to save money. In his speech, Dr Meldrum highlighted a number of areas that should be reviewed. He said:

"We will continue to speak out and oppose wasteful practices, ill-conceived plans, dogma-driven policies, knee-jerk cuts and evidence-free solutions.

"Incoherent and divisive market-based policies that pit trusts against each other, secondary against primary care, increase costs and, in many cases, duplicate existing services. Lucrative contracts for ISTCs that are paid for up-front yet don't deliver on activity - often because there was no need for them in the first place - and new, so-called, ‘GP-led health centres' which often enjoy multiple times the funding per patient of regular GP practices, despite in many cases, very few patients registering with them."

Dr Meldrum also called for tighter controls to ensure doctors from overseas wishing to work in the UK meet the appropriate standards of language and competence, pointing to the recent Ubani inquest. He said: "The UK has benefitted enormously from many overseas doctors, over many years, and will continue to do so. Indeed we need to do much more to mentor and support these valued colleagues, but the recent Ubani case has shocked us all.

"It cannot be acceptable for poorly trained, badly regulated doctors whose knowledge of English is about as good as my knowledge of Chinese, to be able to practise, virtually unchallenged, in the UK.

"My sympathy goes out to the family of David Gray, but sympathy is not enough. We must ensure that the doctors who treat our patients are competent to do so, that they have the necessary language skills and that they are subject to the same regulation as UK doctors. The BMA will continue its work with the government, the GMC and others to make this happen."

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