Delegates at the British Medical Association’s annual GP conference cheered and applauded enthusiastically when one speaker called on Gordon Brown to sack Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, when he takes over as prime minister on June 27.

Dr Hamish Meldrum, who heads the BMA’s GPs committee, warned the labour Government that it would miss its flagship target of cutting patient waiting times to a maximum of 18 weeks because many of its key reforms were failing.

Doctors at the conference in London voted almost unanimously in favour of a motion stating: “This conference has no confidence in: 1) the UK labour government’s handling of the National Health Service, 2) the Secretary of State for Health in England.”

Proposing the motion, Dr Eric Rose, a GP from Milton Keynes, said: “Ten years ago when Labour came to power, I and others had great hopes. Ten years later the reality is a golden opportunity has been wasted, and the dangers to the fabric of the NHS appear greater than ever.”

“No one is more responsible for this than Secretary of State ‘Call me Patricia’. I don’t want to be on first name terms with someone I can’t trust.”

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/15/nhs115.xml

The reaction of key workers – who work at the NHS coal face and have been the beneficiary of labour’s largese towards the NHS is illuminating.

On Jan 31, 07 Health Direct posted: BMA team ‘stunned by GP contract’ as a bit of a laugh when GPs were so stunned by the terms offered to them when negotiating their new contract in 2004 that they thought it was a “bit of a laugh”, a doctor has said.

Dr Simon Fradd, who was one of British Medical Association’s GP negotiators, said they were shocked by the approach taken by the labour government. They could not believe it when GPs were given the chance not to do evening and weekend work for only a 6% pay cut, he said.

Dr Fradd was part of the negotiating team representing the British Medical Association during the two years of talks between 2001 and 2003, although he is no longer on the BMA’s GP committee.

Interviewed for BBC Radio 4′s The Investigation, which was aired on 1 February, Dr Fradd said doctors had never believed the government would be willing to allow them to opt out of out-of-hours care.

And when they did, he was surprised the NHS Confederation negotiating team, acting on behalf of the government, was only asking for a 6% cut in pay.

He added: “We got rid of it for effectively 6% of the value of the contract. It was just stunning. Nobody in my position had ever believed we could pull it off but to get it for 6% was a bit of a laugh.”

Since the contract came in, nine out of 10 practices opted out of providing care.