Integrated care systems are part of the government’s plans for NHS organisations, in partnership with local councils and others, to take collective responsibility for managing resources, delivering NHS standards, and improving the health of the population they serve. This seemingly laudable development has the potential to further undermine the NHS, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic. […]
Category: Government Policy
The media recently highlighted the fact that NHS England has announced: “The NHS is set to radically overhaul the way MRI, CT and other diagnostic services are delivered for patients . . . . Community diagnostic hubs or ‘one stop shops’ should be created across the country, away from hospitals, so that patients can receive […]
Doctors in Unite believe that the current model for social care is not working and that this has been brought into sharp focus during the COVID 19 Pandemic. Care homes bore a huge burden of deaths during the first wave, for many reasons, but not least due to the fragmentation that privatisation has imposed on […]
We sent the following message today, 20 September 2020, to Independent SAGE: “Doctors in Unite fully endorse Independent SAGE’s emergency ten point plan to avoid a national lockdown. [The plan can be found here: https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Emergency-Plan-PUBLISHED.pdf ] Experience from other countries such as Germany, South Korea and Japan has shown that if the correct measures are […]
Dr Applebee proposed the motion by TOWER HAMLETS DIVISION of the BMA: That this meeting, in response to COVID 19, demands that government: i) ensure that workers are not under pressure to attend work either for financial or workforce reasons while they are unwell or self-isolating and at risk of inadvertently passing on the disease; […]
A review of where the UK is in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic 1. Policy failure Richard Horton, editor of the prestigious medical journal ‘The Lancet’, described the management of COVID-19 as the “greatest science policy failure for a generation” in his book on the pandemic. Currently the numbers of newly diagnosed patients are […]
Doctors in Unite is delighted that the government have seen sense and ended the NHS surcharge for overseas health workers. We all owe health workers from overseas a huge debt. They often carry out the work which attracts the lowest pay, and without them the NHS would collapse. They don’t just contribute in the hours […]
The rising death rate from COVID-19 and the pressure of the pandemic on a weakened NHS have caused warranted anxiety. There were reports from Italy of rationing, when life saving equipment was simply unavailable for some sick patients, and difficult triage decisions had to be made by doctors. Many deaths in the UK are occurring […]
Doctors in Unite reiterate our opposition to any scoring system being used as a blanket cut-off to people accessing hospital care. We understand that conversations with patients about their wishes with regard to treatment and end of life care can be very helpful to ensure dignity in dying, but these must be undertaken with the […]
Doctors in Unite would like to remind the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care that the NHS is not a charity but a government funded health service, set up in 1948 with the specific intention to remove health care from the precarious state of reliance on income or beneficence. Matt Hancock has his […]
Doctors in Unite 