Clear these DWP parasites out of GP surgeries

Last Updated: March 2, 2016By

Members of Disabled People Against Cuts protesting on Westminster Bridge last year [Image: Lynda Bowyer/Demotix/Corbis].

This idea is so wrong it should be airlifted to Switzerland and euthanased out of our misery.

Paula Peters is exactly right. Doctors are not DWP employees; their only duty is to look after patients’ health – not to behave as stoolpigeons for ministers who want to clear the sick off the benefit books.

That’s all this scheme is, you see. It’s a bid to push sickness benefit claimants back into the job market by claiming (yet again) that they really aren’t ill at all.

Iain Duncan Smith has ‘form’ when it comes to this. He became Work and Pensions Secretary in the belief that a majority of sickness benefit claimants were malingerers who were fully capable of working – and was proved wrong in very short order.

Ever since, the Gentleman Ranker has been trying to find plausible ways to cut people off, and the death toll wreaked by his disastrous ideas has mounted up.

Look at his draconian ‘work capability assessments’: When the DWP suspended repeat tests, the number of claimant deaths fell.

You would think that would tell him something, but he’s not interested.

Now this.

Doctors in the six pilot surgeries need to throw out this scheme. A message should go to the relevant CCG, never to let the DWP dabble in matters that don’t concern it – and Iain Duncan Smith needs a slap in the face.

Disabled people and benefit claimants are to protest in London against a scheme to embed job coaches with family doctors, which they say will contaminate healthcare with the punitive culture of the government’s work programme.

Critics warn that the scheme jeopardises doctor-patient confidentiality, risks alienating patients from their doctors and perverts the primary role and ethical mission of the healthcare system, which is to help people to recover from illnesses.

Paula Peters, an activist with Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), said: “There is a blurring of the lines between healthcare and the [Department for Work and Pensions] and it’s wrong. We are already having to watch everything we say to doctors, we treat every appointment as a work capability assessment in case it’s used against us.

“We need that money to live. We became unwell through no fault of our own. We need the healthcare support.”

Activists will march on an Islington GP surgery on Friday, one of six that is part of the pilot scheme that officials see as “an opportunity to embed employment into the ‘wiring’ of the healthcare system” by making it part of the clinical outcomes doctors seek for patients.

Funded in part by the local clinical commissioning group (CCG), but with the bulk of the money coming from the DWP, Islington’s Working Better scheme is as yet the only one of its kind in the country.

It offers patients at the six participating practices who are unemployed and have a long-term health condition access to one-to-one employment support with Remploy job coaches.

Source: Activists angry at scheme to embed job coaches in GP surgeries | Politics | The Guardian

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14 Comments

  1. David March 2, 2016 at 12:07 pm - Reply

    IDS has form in using any means possible, legal or not, moral or not to get his way. Cameron must take much of the blame for continually supporting this awful creature.
    Now what happened to Cameron’s Big Society? Is he giving us a good kicking because we wouldn’t wear it?

  2. che March 2, 2016 at 12:10 pm - Reply

    Ian Duncan Smith needs a slap in the face ? He needs more then that, but I thought you condemned any form of violence ??

    • Mike Sivier March 2, 2016 at 6:25 pm - Reply

      Shows how strongly I feel about this, doesn’t it?

  3. mohandeer March 2, 2016 at 2:00 pm - Reply

    If my doctor’s surgery was involved in a scheme like this instead of treating me with respect to my disabilities I would likely ask him/her where he/she parked her ethics and which window did they chuck out the Hypocratic oath, change my doctor’s surgery, then make a complaint to the BMA. That’s one way to clear out a surgery and leave them without any patients. Who would trust such a doctor?

  4. David Woods March 2, 2016 at 2:16 pm - Reply

    Stage 2 has to be ’embedding’ into hospitals, next logical step – getting those hospital malingerers out, evicting the ‘bed blockers’!

    The DWP has no business being in Doctors surgeries, will they be appearing in chemists, loitering as the medication is being handed out!

    How many people will become less forthcoming if they ‘know’ their doctor is talking about them to non medical people, how many with mental health issues will just stop going?

  5. juliette gazzard March 2, 2016 at 2:23 pm - Reply

    Very interesting and something that needs addressing before it ever becomes a normal or accepted practice.
    I have one question that I hope someone will be able to answer, can you tell me exactly what the funding from the CCG has been allocated for, my understanding of CCG is admittedly sketchy, but I’m interested in knowing where they fit into this set up within a gp surgery.
    Many thanks if you know

    • Mike Sivier March 2, 2016 at 6:32 pm - Reply

      In England, the CCG is the organisation that commissions healthcare services and pays for them.

      • juliette gazzard March 3, 2016 at 11:51 am - Reply

        Hello mike I just found an answer to my question on the dwpexamination blog after a bit of searching.

        • Mike Sivier March 3, 2016 at 2:39 pm - Reply

          What was it?

  6. Tony Dean March 2, 2016 at 6:52 pm - Reply

    What worries me is the DWP parasites will be able to write comments in a patients medical records.

  7. juliette gazzard March 3, 2016 at 7:53 am - Reply

    Yes that bit I understand, but what I’m not clear about is the nature of the CCG involvement in this. As I understand things , in the case of gp surgeries the CCG simply allocate funds to the individual surgeries, which operate in effect as small businesses which then have control over the allocated budget.
    Are you saying that the CCG is supplying an extra portion of cash to fund this disastrous intervention, and that these GPS have accepted funds on that basis.
    I did ring ‘the woman who knows about these things’ and we find it hard to see how else it could happen.
    I also know from her the severe pressure that gp surgeries are being put under, particularly with the behaviour of PropCo, but selling their souls at the expense of their patients is surely not the way to go. I do hope you will prove my worries to be unfounded because GPS are the most public face of the NHS so destroying trust in these people would be a catastrophe in the present political climate.

    • Mike Sivier March 4, 2016 at 4:20 pm - Reply

      I don’t think your worries are unfounded.

  8. hilary772013 March 3, 2016 at 8:09 am - Reply

    “They can’t do anymore harm” I say it every time the DWP/Government comes up with another nasty scheme BUT time & time again they prove me wrong.
    They just want to exterminate anyone that doesn’t fit their bill/agenda.. it is DEATH by STEALTH & it’s working. Time the UK woke up to just how heinous this government is but as long as the Toties control the media we have no chance.

  9. Malcolm MacINTYRE-READ March 5, 2016 at 7:19 pm - Reply

    As I have said a number of times before… and probably with more to come… “Sick, Sicker, Sickest”.

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