Posted on 29th March by whatthebleepdoc
How would you privatise the main thing that makes most people proud to be
British?(1)
Start by putting yourself in the shoes of the current Health Secretary. You
have helped write a book recommending the privatisation of the NHS with you
stating “our ambition should be to break down barriers between private and
public provision, in effect denationalising the health care in Britain.”(2) You have a cousin who was previously MP for
South West Surrey and Health Secretary who may have helped you get the same positions;
she is now a director for the private healthcare company Smith & Nephew and
before that, for BUPA.(3) Now let us
presume that you want to privatise the NHS, what would you do?
What would you do first?
Public announcement of privatisation would see public outcry, and once the
public were against you, you’d probably lose your job as Health Secretary. Public
support is KEY!
How to Privatise?
“The standard technique of privatisation: defund,
make sure things don’t work, people get angry, and you hand it over to private capital.”(4)
When the NHS doesn’t work you will need to aim the public anger towards the
healthcare employees failing to deliver the service. You will need to
concentrate on feeding stories to media to help spin and support your campaign
to land the blame at the feet of the healthcare professionals.
Defunding the NHS by directly reducing the amount of money given to healthcare
is too public and will get heavily scrutinised. If you find a way to stretch
services without additional funding, it will have the same impact. It will make sure services across the board
fail.
Choosing a Service to Stretch.
You will need to pick a service that will get public support. The obvious
choice would be emergency care services, as everyone wants the best emergency
care possible, but what would you stretch with this service? You can’t make people
have more accidents or more heart attacks to strain the services and the
service is already 24/7.
Elective services are currently supplied 5 days a week. Why can’t you have the
hospitals doing knee replacements and hernia repairs 7 days a week? Surely the
public will support extending these elective services to 7 days a week? You can
also build your campaign around a ‘7 day NHS’ to blur the lines between
emergency and elective services which will help you build support.
You will have to change the contracts with all the healthcare professionals so
you can stretch the current elective workforce over 7 days, and make these
contracts cost neutral to provide an unfunded new service.(5)
Choosing a Profession to Target
You don’t want to take on all the healthcare professionals at once as this will unite them, and they could block your plans. So you need to take them on one at a time, but which professionals to start with?
1. Nurses have to do some of the hardest and dirtiest work, and on a modest wage. It would be hard to take nurses on first if they don’t agree to your contract and they will most likely have overwhelming public support.
2. Consultants would be easier to portray as greedy, money hungry doctors, however they also have a lot of power they can leave or decide to retire early and they are difficult to replace.
3. Junior doctors are a group of people, doing quite well at life and not getting a bad salary. They are reasonably young and impressionable that you should be able to manipulate and once they have taken the contract you will be able to push it onto consultants, nurses, paramedics, healthcare assistants, lab technicians, cleaners, administration staff and all the other healthcare professionals.
Would you privatise the NHS any other way?
Jeremy Hunt could not have predicted how proactive junior doctors were to
standing up to his contract(6) and to
proceed to take industrial action. He couldn’t have predicted the public getting
behind and supporting junior doctors throughout the process, but don’t believe
that Jeremy has made a big mistake. He has planned the best way possible to privatise
the NHS, he’s currently just hitting a feel bumps in the road.
3. http://www.smith-nephew.com/new-zealand/about-us/who-we-are/our-board/
4. https://politicsbitesize.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/debunking-the-defunded-nhs/
5. http://www.itv.com/news/update/2016-02-11/can-junior-doctors-contract-really-be-cost-neutral/
6. http://www.whatthebleep.co.uk/
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