More on NHS patient contracts

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick notes the irony of the opposition to the proposed contracts from organisations like the BMA that have supported the very trends in recent years that have led to this contractual relationship:

'In the new order being forged in medical practice in Britain, the patient is no longer an individual seeking treatment for illness. Instead, the patient is a unit of a population in which target quotas have been set for interventions (of highly dubious efficacy) designed to reduce rates of coronary heart disease, strokes, cancers and other diseases. The doctor is no longer an individual skilled in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, but is a bureaucratic functionary, the mere executor of protocols and the follower of guidelines, a ticker of boxes and a filler-in of forms.'

Signing away the NHS, Spiked, 4 June 2003