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The Perilous State of the UK’s NHS

The Health Care Renewal blog cites an editorial in the British Medical Journal describing how the spirit of medical professionalism is dying due to top-down administrative decision making. 

“And although medicine has embraced the need for evidence based medicine, policy making remains largely an evidence-free zone. [Richard Lehman wrote,] ‘the personal responsibility of our professional leadership to mark out where the evidence lies, what it says, and what it is lacking.’

But where is our leadership? And where, asks Ian Greener, are the voices raised in protest against the breakdown of Aneuran Bevan‘s founding concordat: that the government would fund the health service but leave its operational running to the doctors. ‘The government has found ways to interfere in medical practice on a remarkable scale,’ he writes.”