'Sir' Liam Donaldson appears to have buggered off and Deborah Arnott is still mucking about in the background somewhere but not as strident as she was. I therefore nominate 'Professor' Mike Kelly who was given ten minutes on BBC breakfast telly today to spout his vile gibberish. Even Sian Williams was squirming in her seat with embarrassment.
Particular galling was/is:
1. The way in which 'Professor' Mike Kelly saw himself as part of the proud tradition of 'public health' in this country - he mentioned the Victorians cleaning up the water supplies to prevent cholera etc and the clean air acts of the post-war period (all good stuff, that is truly public health - where there is nothing that any individual can do about it) before slipping in the smoking ban, which he claimed had reduced the number of heart attacks (whether to smoke or not is a personal decision, ergo is not a 'public health' issue, and even if heart attacks had gone down, they are not a 'public health' issue either), and the rounding off by saying that the crowning achievement of all this was inventing new rules on what ingredients food manufaturers are allowed to use (perhaps they are unhealthy, what do I know, but again, this is not a 'public health' issue and none of his f***ing business).
2. The way the BBC describe NICE as an "NHS watchdog". IIRC, they are there to decide which drugs or treatments are safe and/or good value for money, and not to tell people what to eat. Their core responsibility is of course a difficult and thankless task - namely rationing things that are 'free at point of use' - and I'm not qualified to say how often they get it right or wrong.
While I'm on the general topic, I must link to Snowdon's excellent fun with numbers.
No wonder he's never around
24 minutes ago
12 comments:
I don't know whether NICE are competent, but as long as we have an NHS we need something to do NICE's job. But this latest puritanism drive is quite enough to justify sacking the wee shit.
"Mission creep", I believe it is called.
Juat how many outfits do we actually need to tell us the same thing?
CR.
Works for me!
Just to remind everybody, fucking NICE tried to fucking kill me -
http://lolathebeautiful.blogspot.com/2009/11/quangos-try-to-kill-you.html
My response? Whatever they say - do the opposite.
No we do NOT need someone to do NICEs job.
NICE are a consequence of the Blair love affair with evidence based medicine, which, like so much to do with the med establishment in the UK, is simply invented out of thin air.
The sooner they are shut down the better, together with all the 'administrators' in the NHS.
See a Google search for Bruce Charlton and EBM or evidence, for his paper - 'The Rise and Fall of EBM' for more details.
If you're nominating, I'll be seconder.
Either some bugger, or buggers, rations procedures and drugs, or the cost of the NHS tends to infinity.
D, first and second comments, exactly. Who does the rationing is another topic, but somebody has to do it.
CR, most women have some outfits that tell them to eat less and other outfits to tell them to eat more.
JM, DP, thanks.
L, good link.
Ch, see what D says.
Best for the patient themselves to do the "rationing".
AC1, sure, but health costs are very 'lumpy', so all but the super rich would have to take out insurance in case they need an operation that might cost £10,000 or £20,000. And once you have an insurance company, you have non-price rationing, spurious claims, admin, hassle, value judgments.
In fact, the only people I trust less than the government are insurance companies. Taxpayer-funding of health costs is just a grandiose insurance scheme, but is subject to some democratic control, and entails a modest amount of redistribution.
A fair compromise would be a ten per cent patient contribution to a largely taxpayer-funded scheme, but with competing providers.
Not sure why you are fixating on costs and 'rationing', it has very little to do with what you were discussing, or with what NICE is supposed to do.
Their job, as suggested by their creepy full title, is to develop the lists of boxes to tick, so that a 'best practice' diagnosis and treatment can be established for everything.
This means that as part of that process, they decide the 'appropriate' medicines to use for a particular diagnosis, hence your 'rationing'.
It also allows for relaxed standards for doctors and armies of administrators to vet the boxes ticked, and cosy deals with pharmas to include their expensive products in the treatment regimes.
Especially for the newly invented chronic 'diseases' which demand immediate results.
What we're seeing is the logical 'mission creep' extension of their remit.
Absolutely agreed. And NICE costs £60 million a year by the way.
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