01.04.11
Public health and training proposals slammed by BMA
The BMA has accused ministers of seeking to “further fragment” the NHS with two new sets of proposals for public health and workforce planning.
A better way forward, the BMA argues, is for all three areas of public health – health protection, health improvement and support for commissioning – to be employed by a single NHS public health agency.
The workforce training proposals, put forward in the new White Paper, ‘Liberating the NHS: Developing the Health Care Workforce’, are undetailed and could impact patient care, the BMA said.
Its chairman of council, Dr Hamish Meldrum said: “In these two final consultations related to the Health and Social Care Bill, we find, yet again, that the Government is racing towards further fragmentation of the NHS.
“The proposals for public health are causing great anxiety among doctors who believe the plans are flawed and could lead to the NHS losing the skills and expertise of hundreds of highly trained public health doctors.
“The plans for medical education and training could be very damaging to the NHS because of their lack of detail, the overly ambitious pace of change and the failure to consider effectively their impact on medical training and patient care.”
Dr Tom Dolphin, co-chair of the BMA’s Junior Doctor Committee, added: “The last major upheaval of medical training, in 2007, culminated in the collapse of the application system for specialist training. Since then there has been a gradual improvement in the recruitment process based on small changes supported by evidence. The current proposals do not seem to provide proper oversight of medical training and there is great fear that the system for training doctors could slide into decline. The Government’s plans will effectively abolish the postgraduate medical deaneries which provide important local scrutiny of the quality of medical training and ensure patient safety is not jeopardised by poor training.”
The full responses are at www.bma.org.uk/healthcare_policy/public_health_white_paper/index.jsp
and
www.bma.org.uk/healthcare_policy/workforce...
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