A couple of years ago I had an interesting conversation with a friend who has since become a consultant physician in Scotland. It was her belief that she, and most of her contemporaries, saw themselves as ‘medical civil servants’. It seems that successive government policies have eroded not only the real value of doctors & dentists to the country and with repeated attacks on their competence, not to mention the imposition of targets, their perceived worth by the population but also their self worth.
In dentistry the 2006 contract imposition saw the effective removal of many practices’ goodwill value and the dentists become target chasers on a fixed income; fixed that is unless they missed their targets in which case the only change was downwards. So we have two years of new graduates who having seen the NHS from their VT years may well believe that ‘this is how it works’ and accept the new way of working without complaint.
These couple of links to “Pulse” magazine for doctors shows exactly where the government are heading in order to gain complete control of the supply of health services. I suppose that’s what happens when you let a postman run the NHS.
First up the newly opened salaried (and therefore inefficient compared with the self-employed) general practice polyclinic. Here
Next another knife in the ribs from the secretary of state on the subject of single-handed practitioners, it really is despicable the way a holder of high public office, in a government that has been in power for more than 11 years, can make a statement that “many solo practitioners do not even meet 1948 standards”.
Have your spin doctors just thought that one up because it will be easier to hive multiple surgeries off to the medical equivalent of ADP? By damning one man bands means that the others are much better? It hasn’t worked in dentistry where the opening of a polyclinic results in the growth of independent practitioners’ businesses.
Does this have a familiar ring to anyone involved in dentistry?
The Incisal Edge 