Chris Lancelot is right; the NHS is sick (GP, 17 November).
The government’s puppets, the CMO, the DoH, SHAs and primary care organisations (PCOs) act as if suffering from a paranoid psychosis with a fixed delusional system.
The government is totally self-obsessed. No matter how many sham consultations it orchestrates, it has its own agenda: to gain political favour by forcing through what it thinks are vote-winning policies: Choice, Choose and Book, community matrons revalidation, grading practices according to their ability to tick boxes on computers. The trouble is, because it doesn’t listen, it has chosen things that nobody wants… not patients, and certainly not doctors.
The DoH and CMO think that without constant interference, monitoring and testing, GPs will be lazy, irresponsible, wasteful mass murderers. They seem to think that the word ‘professional’ implies that those who claim to be so hide behind the illusion it creates so that they can fail to provide care in the most profligate way possible.
But why are doctors more highly regarded by the public than politicians, lawyers and journalists — every group that seek to denigrate them?
It’s because the public know that the medical profession can be trusted to do the best job it can in the face of the most difficult circumstances, imposed upon it by those who seek to undermine it.
Doctors should unite and stand firm, confident in the people’s trust.
In areas where PCOs have been instructed to favour tenders from private companies over existing NHS-employed organisations, the public are under no illusion about the destructive intent of government policy.
As more conflict unfolds let’s hope that the electorate will see through the Orwellian doublespeak of the bunch of malevolent smilers who currently rule over us and deselect them.
Paranoid delusional states don’t go away. You can tranquillise them, but they remain in the background.
The only way to deal with people or organisations that suffer from them is to remove them from positions where they can do any harm.
Dr Paul Harris
Norwich
