Welcome to NHS Hospital Web Log

I am a consultant working in an NHS hospital in the UK. I have worked for the NHS all my working life and have experienced at first hand the deterioration in how the service is run. The ethos of the NHS has changed from being a service to becoming a business. Bureaucracy, administrators and managers abound at the expense of clinical staff. Decisions are made on financial and not clinical grounds; a "business case" has to be made to justify any proposal by doctors to improve the care of their patients, and if there is no financial profit, it is invariably rejected. Targets are set centrally which have little to do with an overall improvement in health care but a lot to do with political gain. The views of the clinical staff are often disregarded, and in many cases, any prior consultation is little more than a sham as the decisions have already been made. Doctors are being treated as technicians rather than professionals. For example, I do not know of any hospital doctor, senior or junior, who believes that the shift system recently introduced for junior doctors improves either training or patient care, quite the opposite. Working in a hospital is fast becoming like working in a factory.

The list goes on and on. The end result is that morale amongst the clinical staff is at the lowest level I have known. Absenteeism due to illness has never been greater. Doctors with a wealth of experience are taking early retirement in increasing numbers. Hospital doctors have become disenfranchised and this cannot but harm the care they can offer their patients.

So, why this web log. There are two main reasons:

1. I am not aware of a similar blog already in existence.
2. The bodies who claim to represent the views of hospital doctors such as the British Medical Association (BMA), the General Medical Council (GMC) and even the various Royal Colleges are at best too weak, at worst run by those who have sold out to the management culure which is destroying the NHS.

Feel free to add your comments. Perhaps it is not too late to save the NHS from becoming the NHB (National Health Business).