Are their stethoscopes tuned to the right note?

DOWN at the Barking Dog they were talking about the importance of good doctors dermatologists who do not make rash decisions, brain surgeons who don’t change your mind and ophthalmologists who don’t just make the spots in front of your eyes clearer. No problem if their writing resembles graffiti as long as their stethoscopes are tuned to the right note.

A recent BMA survey of doctors in Wales, following their measly pay rise offer, indicated that 700 would leave the NHS and that service was “close to collapse”. They cite low morale, staff shortages, lack of resources and poor working conditions and rightly regard the pay offer, well below inflation, as further evidence of how they are undervalued.

The most recent NHS Wales performance data indicates a dodgy prognosis with waiting lists and waiting time for treatment and diagnostic services needing some invasive action.

Welsh Government replied with the usual anaemic mantra that without additional funding there are limits. We all know now about NHS bureaucracy and the neglect, underinvestment and the irritable bowel movements of the Tory government.

This economic and delivery stalemate is a far cry from the optimism and aspiration of the 1942 Beveridge report which would slay the giants of want, disease, ignorance and squalor and the founding principles and values of the NHS which included equity and accessibility to health care regardless of ability to pay. It was a remarkable cultural shift towards social solidarity that led to the NHS and also the belief that a healthy population is a social investment.

The NHS still suffers from a clash of ideologies between what the founder of the NHS stood for and market place policies. Anyone who has visited the US will know what a nightmare, inequitable system the latter is.

In 1948 Aneurin Bevan had to compromise to win over the consultants’ commercial interests by what he called “stuffing their mouths with gold”.

Yet the cost-of-living crisis might well ventilate the words of sociologist Robert Pinker: “the ideological skeletons hang in separate cupboards but the political wind rattles both sets of bones”.