I don’t imagine health secretary Andrew Lansley will have a very relaxing summer holiday this year.
Parliament has gone into recess and MPs are scurrying off to their constituencies and holiday homes as we speak, but it looks like Mr Lansley may well be spending the summer dealing with possibly the fiercest criticism yet of his Health Bill.
How many GPs would actually vote to strike over the pensions issue – and how many who voted in favour would then carry out the threat?
This is a calculation that the boffins in Whitehall have probably been sweating over since the BMA vote on industrial action – or maybe not. Does anyone in the government seriously believe that a strike would take place?
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Deadlines meant that last week I had to write the GP newspaper leader column that would appear in this Friday’s issue in advance of the BMA special representative meeting (SRM).
Lots of potential to gauge the mood of the profession wrongly particularly as the possibility of industrial action had not been ruled out.
GPOnline reports today that the BMA has received at least 100 motions for its special meeting in March, as doctors’ concerns over the Health Bill grow.
It follows a story in today’s Guardian that Dr Meldrum’s future is in doubt because grassroots medics blame the BMA for doing too little to oppose the government’s NHS shake-up.
Health secretary Andrew Lansley’s decision earlier this week
to extend the pilots for revalidation for another year was inevitable.
Last week the BMA published a damning response to the GMC’s
consultation on revalidation, saying the system would be too expensive and
‘disproportionate’.
In this week’s issue of GP our splash also reveals that the planned
timetable for revalidation was already slipping. At an RCGP policy debate last
month, Professor Mike Pringle, the college’s revalidation lead, predicted only
1,000 GPs would submit themselves for revalidation in 2011, all of whom were
part of the pilots. Last autumn, the college suggested the number would be more
like 12,000.
In the face of such delays and such vehement criticism from the profession itself the health secretary really had no
option but to defer the deadline.
It is difficult to say what will happen now, but clearly
there are many obstacles to overcome. Revalidation for GPs does appear to be
slightly more advanced than is the case for other branches of medicine, but
even here there are still big question marks over how it will work for locums
and part-time GPs.
Most worrying for the government, I expect, will be the
overall cost of implementation. The system has yet to be properly
costed (something that won’t be possible until the pilots are complete) and it
is impossible to imagine ministers spending big on this in the current climate.
On saying that, Mr Lansley says he is committed to
revalidation and it is unthinkable that the whole idea would be abandoned. But the
GMC and the royal colleges have a lot more work to do to get the processes
involved right.
On a more positive note for GPs, there are some signs that
funding for revalidation may be made available. There is speculation in GP‘s
splash this week that the cost of revalidation may be up for discussion when
the GP contract is renegotiated next year.
But what do you think? Can the GMC come up with a
revalidation system that doctors will support and, if so, what should it look
like? And, should the government be responsible for funding revalidation and the
more costly issue of remediation as part of this?
Healthcare Republic reports on Wednesday that ‘it may be hard for whichever party is in government after the election to keep the lid on public sector pay’, according to research organisation the Labour Research Department.
It was almost 1am on Thursday night; I was having a little digestif on the harbour in St Tropez during my annual holiday in the south of France when it started. Texts, missed calls, emails… my iPhone was in hysterics and my journalist friend’s phone kicked off too.
What is going on? Has everyone in London been contaminated with swine flu? Has Gordon Brown decided to put everyone in quarantaine? God forbid, will we be forced to stay in St Tropez for another week?! We looked around us first, thinking if something big had happened more people would be frantically typing on their phones too. But around us everybody was still sipping their mojitos unaware of the massive event that was about to be announced.
“You must know by now but just in case, Michael Jackson just died of heart failure. Hope you’re having a lovely time”, said my friend’s text.
What do you mean we must know by now. Yes we are both journalists. But no of course we don’t know yet, we’ve been spending two days in paradise aka the Riviera, our main activities consisting of trying to decide which beach we would go that day and what time we should book lunch on that same beach to make sure we would have a table in the sun. BBC news was a distant memory and I had finally gotten rid of my TV-watching withdrawal symptoms.
So no, I had no idea what was going on in the world. The news suddenly monopolised every single medium (in France and everywhere else) from Thursday night. I mean, there was just nothing else on any radio station in southern France for the next few days. Special MJ programmes – I think I managed to get an overdose of Thriller – and interviews with every possible celebrity who had something to say about ‘Le Roi de la Pop’.
And it just overshadowed pretty much everything. New cases of swine flu, the Jade Goody latest effect, street protests in Iran… Every other news took a back seat on Friday as the world was trying to unravel the mysterious death of (surely) the most famous singer of all times.
I am now back at work and trying to catch up with the healthcare and medical news. And there is no lack of excitement here either. We have a reporter attending the BMA’s annual representative meeting, which began in Liverpool today; there is the latest on swine flu and much more to come as the NHS is bracing itself for the heatwave expected to hit Britain this week. The Met Office is expected to increase the official heat health warning
to level three, the second highest level, as temperatures could reach 33 degrees this week. Stay tuned.
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