Remedy UK is pleased to have been invited to be a part of the NHS Future Forum - a special group which the government will consult over improving the Health and Social Care Bill.
We hope that this will be an opportunity for junior doctors to plant a foothold on a secure training structure for the future.
The Health and Social Care Bill creates two particular problems for doctors in training which we would like addressed. Fragmentation of clinical services will make it much harder for doctors to arrange training programmes.
We expect to see a lessening of the role of deaneries, which have always been fatally compromised by their internal conflicts between their educational goals and their SHA paymasters. We are keen to see the Royal Colleges given a stronger voice in maintaining professional standards, and we consider that they can best ensure that doctors-in-training are sent to the most appropriate training units.
We also want mechanisms in place to avoid the hands-off management style which could relegate manpower planning to the whims of market forces. We will be fighting to ensure that universal training structures and standards are preserved and that better mechanisms exist to plan workforce numbers. The government must not wash its hands of this responsibility and apportion blame to someone else if things don’t work out.
Last month Remedy affirmed our view that there is some good in the Health and Social Care Bill, as well as some bad, and we emphasised that the budgetary constraints - NHS chief executive David Nicholson’s challenge of £15bn efficiency savings by 2015 - have been receiving insufficient attention.
The email responses we received unsurprisingly ranged from very positive to very negative (the balance was about 3:2 towards the negative) and we have taken note of these comments. But we firmly believe that that are hard decisions to be made about rationing and constriction of services, and these decisions should be made by doctors. Not by local politicians who are looking for the next vote.
We look forward to taking part in the improvement of the Bill and defending the ability of doctors to get world class training in a new NHS.
Tags: Health policy
