NHS Plc – The privatisation of our health care

[摘要] This is likely to be a controversial and much discussed book. It will be very unpopular in the corridors of power, which alone should ensure a wide readership. Having last worked in the NHS in 1986 and suffered under the New Zealand health reforms of the 1990s, I shouldn't perhaps have been surprised by this book. I was, however, not just surprised but appalled at the facts and figures, which Professor Pollock has assembled to support her account of the disastrous privatisation of the NHS in recent decades. She describes in detail the ideological obsession of successive governments with the belief that the market will solve the problems created by decades of underfunding a system that once was the envy of the world. Her recurring thesis is that the involvement of private business in the private funding initiatives (PFIs) led inevitably to expensive, yet smaller, hospitals offering less comprehensive services. These reductions were exacerbated by the hospital trusts having to service the new, and massively increased, debt from their operating budgets. The efficiencies needed to achieve the necessary savings resulted in a cascade of more restricted services; an army of managers and accountants needed to track expenditure. Savings were made by casualising the nursing workforce, outsourcing ancillary services, and higher transaction costs led to further cuts … and so on.

[学科分类] 卫生学