GPs bribed to send FEWER cancer patients for vital hospital tests
This is despicable:
GPs are being offered cash to send fewer patients with suspected cancer to hospital for vital tests.Surgeries can claim thousands of pounds worth of “incentives” for not sending patients to hospitals for tests, scans and operations, according to an investigation by doctors’ magazine Pulse.
First appointments for cancer – which should happen within two weeks of a GP suspecting the disease – are included in some of the targets to cut referrals, the probe found.
The rewards are being offered by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), local NHS bodies responsible for commissioning of healthcare across the country.
The move comes as the NHS is trying to slash £22billion in costs before 2020.
Source: GPs ‘bribed’ to send FEWER cancer patients for vital hospital tests – Mirror Online
The Mirror blasted the policy, run by CCGs that were created as part of the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 which began the mass-privatisation of the NHS, in its editorial:
Bribing family doctors not to send patients to hospitals for cancer tests is sacrificing lives by turning the NHS into a cut-price market place.
GPs should never be awarded bonuses at the cost of the public’s health. Those incentives are indefensible, because the likelihood is that cancers will go undetected.
Early detection is vital and when England’s cancer survival rates are already among the lowest in Europe, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt should be demanding that more people are tested sooner.
Doctors must be free to make objective decisions on medical grounds rather than receiving dangerous instructions that reduce patients to financial statistics.
But don’t blame your doctor. Blame the Government. A Tory Government. The NHS wasn’t perfect under Labour but the Tories don’t appear to care at all.
This wasteful party is handing down a death sentence for unsuspecting patients. And that’s unforgiveable.
It is. How many people have lost loved ones to cancer, but still voted Conservative in May, allowing many more to suffer the same fate?
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
Yep yesterday I was talking to my friend phill who said he had a small lump in his lung so waited for the doctor to get intouch with hospital they took their time but found one so then another wait but sadly he now has two lumps one in each lung tolate for the op sadly today the news breaks why he waited solong its has we know its all todo with monies just another way these nazi go with their grand plan aktion t4 how many more jeff3
Has your friend contacted the newspapers?
I think it’s vitally important that this case be brought before the public. Get him to call the Daily Mirror, pronto!
Is this an NHS England thing or has this evil been perpetrated in the devolved nations?
NHS England. No CCGs in Wales!
Yay go the People’s Socialist Republic of Cymru. I can dream.
Many moons ago if you were ill you turned up at the Surgery and waited until seen. Yup some times it was standing room only for hours but eventually you got seen first come, first served.
Now I have to wait two weeks sometimes to be granted an audience with a GP. However
if I go into the same surgery, any morning early or late, the same old waiting room is totally empty or maybe just one/two patients waiting. So now some of these well paid GP’s are being bribed to do their job properly .what the !……Worst thing ever bringing in CCG’s it seemed like a good idea at the time but like the dentists fiasco and other ill thought out schemes from amateur civil/government servants if you put the wolves in charge of the hen house ………it can only get worse.
No, they’re being bribed to NOT do their job properly.
My local surgery here in Wales. If I or any of my family need to see the GP we have only to phone in the morning before 9 and we will be seen that morning.
Routine non emergency will take a little longer but if you’re not that ill you can wait.
That’s the ‘terrible’ Welsh NHS for you.
My 95 year old mother with 2 artificial hips and Alzheimers lives at home in her flat alone. Carers go in 4 times a day every day to support her paid for by the local council though she has to contribute £60 a week out of her £80 attendance allowance. So that’s £20 on her spending.
My 26 year old daughters jaw kept dislocating. It took about a week to schedule and complete a surgical procedure and she was discharged within 12 hours and had the stitches out today. She’s delighted with the outcome.
We sit this side of Offa’s Dyke and pity the English. Lol
Dispicable… but oh so tory.. why am I even surprised?! :-/
Can the names of the GPs who have participated in this dispicable scheme be published? Whilst you might be aware if a hospital appointment is delayed or not forthcoming after being discussed with the GP, if they do not indicate to you that an appointment is a good idea, you may not know for a long time that you should be seeing a specialist.
This piece has already been removed from my wall with my comments below.
No surprise here. Have known or suspected this for several years and my family has suffered at least two deaths because of it. Thanks to the CQC (Quality in Care Commission) The
GP responsible is no longer in practice. The charge being that patients were not allowed access to proper medical care. Any doubts or suspicions go immediately to the CQC site and lodge your complaint.
Why removed from your wall, if you agree with it?
What I’m about to write goes back to the 2010 election. My relation who is a doctor at an NHS hospital found that very soon after the Tories were elected one morning when she/he logged onto to her computer masses of former guidance relating to treatment targets and certain items of best practice had been erased overnight. And if my memory of one of the specifics serves me well one of those related to the length of time between first seeing a doctor and being diagnosed, where cancer is suspected. Apparently, some Health Authorities still adhere to those guidelines, while others do not, as it’s no longer a ‘shall do’ set down by government, but a ‘may do’.
It’s fairly clear to me, and the above post reinforces this understanding, that the likes of Cameron, Hunt and Osborne believe themselves to be of a superior class of person and us to be mere means to an end. No prizes for guessing what that end is, but it’s something they are born with shedloads of.
For some reason there’s no reblog button visible for me, so I hope you don’t mind but will copy n paste, providing the link back to your article with a credit to you as well, Mike. It’s very important this is shared
Sure – as long as it’s not the whole article. Give ’em a taste and then they should come here and read the rest. It’s what I do with other bloggers’ articles.
Okay
Yes, I am in a high risk area and group for Cancer so undoubtedly I will be one of the ones to get knocked off earlier than others. I maybe a tad facetious there but the picture presented when you scan across the social policy sphere and, well, VW et al., well, I think many can be forgiven for feeling that they have stepped into Susan George’s fictional scenario, The Lugano Report.
Interesting point of note is that whilst this scheme results in removing access to life and causing early deaths, clearly removing access to life seems an intended outcome of this scheme, Government on the other hand is encouraging the use of big data and data mining to identify, amongst the populace, those at risk of Cancer (probabilistic).
This is being discussed right now at the Local Authority level in Calderdale and elsewhere. Patient records, dietary history of kids in school (they thumbprint the children and to pay for the meals they use a thumb scanner), facebook posts, social media i.e. significant parts of the GCHQ/NSA dataset in essence.
I have to question how these two things sit together and it is a very, very sobering thought experiment in my mind. Its happening and you all need to seriously consider these two crossovers.
Yup: Follows on perfectly from the barrage of stories about ‘too much testing’ that have been coming from the likes of Margaret McCartney, and all Wessely’s ‘MUS’ minions, on the BBC, in the BMJ, Lancet, Twitter, for years. This is clearly stage two. Stage three they will be complaining about people blocking up hospitals by dying in A&E instead of going through the proper channels.
Incidentally: have you noticed how, if they communicate with you at all, it’s by second class post, while at the same time, GPs and consultants communicate with each other by email, but never copy the patient in so that we know what’s going on? Patients exist to serve doctors: not the other way around.
I’ve now been bedbound for several years and been accused of being a hypochondriac when i try to demand some genuine service to find out what’s wrong with me.
I wasted 3 1/2 years in psych units after being summarily convicted of hypochondria rather than being properly investigated. I was forcibly injected with psychotropic drugs which made my illness even worse. I was regularly given confession statements of my alleged hypochondria to sign, which I could not sign without making myself a liar. I demanded in writing that they stop writing unprovable and damaging statements about me, but they just routinely carried on, so that I cannot now go anywhere for medical help without my constructed reputation preceding me and prejudicing my case by destroying my credibility.
Then, when I couldn’t stand up any more they discharged me to my home, where I’ve now been lying in bed for 19 months. I was lucky that I was discharged when I was, because I could then call an ambulance, and was found to have clots on my lungs. If the psych unit had not kicked me out after ignoring my physical deterioration all the time I was under their ‘care’ I would be dead.
A younger man in the room next to mine had been coughing his guts up at 3am every night for ages. I warned staff that he should be in a proper hospital. One night it all went quiet. He was 32. Not long after I had been sent home, another patient friend who had been patronised and treated as neurotic for years, died ‘suddenly’, of cancer!
Nobody is the slightest bit remorseful for what they’ve done to me, and I am still made to feel like a criminal when I dare to ask for help. These dead acquaintances were soon forgotten. There must be hundreds more like them every year.
And people have the nerve to spread the utter fantasy of ‘too much testing’! No: there is NOT to much testing: there is an epidemic of patronisation and ignorance, and victim blaming. It is a culture throughout the NHS, and the occasional BMJ efforts at encouraging patient involvement, and ‘the expert patient’, are entirely negated by the constant stream of articles spreading the memes of ‘the worried well’ and ‘too much testing’.
It’s a laugh that you say the GPs own magazine is complaining about GPs being asked not to refer people for tests: their magazines are where the government got the idea from!
I have tried to make official complaints, about my own case but, whenever I am sent a copy of what my complaint is supposed to be, it is always a complete misrepresentation of what I have said, and then needs to be complained about in itself. And there’s no legal aid to help, even if one knew where to begin: there are so many wrongs being done.
Sick people in this country are expected to research their illnesses for themselves; then they are accused of ‘being too concerned about their health’. Then the ‘too much testing meme’ comes in, and it is made out that testing people is just pandering to their ‘illness beliefs’, so no more must be done. Psychiatrist Simon Wessely has been one of the most influential spreaders of this meme, and, in the media, Margaret McCartney has been banging on about it for years. You can blame them for this latest development. I could see it coming from miles away.
At the same time that one is being denied service by the NHS, one is constantly being attacked by the DWP for not getting better!!! The harder you try to get better, the more firmly and rudely you are shoved aside by the NHS! Then the more you are attacked by the DWP!
What is more: we are constantly told that there are too many long term sick people: but, if you are in a terrible state and get taken to A&E, they just ask you how long you’ve been ill, and as soon as you try to explain you’ve been getting steadily worse, you get sent away, because if it’s chronic, there is, by definition, no rush!!!
Tell me why, in all the many many years of attacks on the sick for being sick, and the attempts to force them to work somehow: *there has never, NOT ONCE, been any call, from any sector of medicine, politics, or media, that sick people should be got back to work by making a concerted effort to find out what is keeping us ill, and damned well fixing it!*
I can only conclude that the sick are being deliberately kept sick in order to go on serving as everybody’s scapegoat.