Easing of red tape by scrapping most Government-imposed public sector targets

Public sector targets to be scrapped - Guardian

Extract:

"A bonfire of government targets to ease red tape affecting schools, hospitals and town halls will be ordered tomorrow as part of a sweeping reform of public services, the Guardian can reveal. Most of the 110 Whitehall-imposed priorities that have dominated the public sector for the past nine years will be abandoned .

Andy Burnham, the chief secretary to the Treasury, is coordinating a move to end one of the defining characteristics of the Blair years by scrapping all but 30 top-down targets used to vet performance.

The targets - from raising the GCSE pass rate to reducing the fear of crime - helped to drive through the big pledges in Labour's election manifestos. But they rankled with doctors, teachers and other public servants who felt their professional discretion had been curtailed.

In an interview with the Guardian today, Mr Burnham set out a new approach, making local service chiefs responsible for setting performance objectives and answering to local communities if they are not ambitious enough. He said: "This is the opening of a new chapter ... If we get this right, the style of government will feel different. We want to give out a message of more trust in public bodies."

Under the system, there will be no more than 30 public service agreements, committing Whitehall departments to use their budgets over the three years to 2010/11 to achieve the government's goals."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

Health minister, Andy Burnham, was booed at Unison union conference

Health minister booed at union conference - The Argus

Extract:

"A minister was booed and heckled by health workers todaywhen he tried to defend the Government's policies on the NHS which threaten to spark a summer of strikes.

Health Minister Andy Burnham faced a wall of silence when he stood up to address Unison's health workers' conference in Brighton.

Dozens of delegates held up posters which read: "Low pay, no way, NHS here to stay."

Then there was regular heckling and booing and some of the delegates laughed at parts of the minister's speech."

This reception for Andy Burnham was entirely predictable. - See my previous blog entry.

I'm no fan of Andy Burnham either...)o: - See my webpage http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

UK Doctors to face regular competency tests and General Medical Council stripped of some powers. Also Nick Clegg, Andy Burnham, complacency...

Doctors to face regular competency tests

Extract:

"Doctors are to face checks every five years to check that they are competent to continue working, under new plans announced today.

The Government is also to strip the doctors' regulatory body of a key powers, in a move likely to anger medical professionals.

The General Medical Council will lose the right to adjudicate in fitness to practise cases when complaints are made against doctors.

The GMC will still investigate concerns about doctors but the final decision on what happens to a doctor is likely to pass to an independent tribunal.

The Government's White Paper is part of a response to the Shipman inquiry, which was heavily critical of the GMC. "

Well it's certainly high time for the GMC to be stripped of its adjudication of complaints about doctors since it has always so scandalously favoured doctors over complainants. But I question the procedures that will comprise the competency tests. - Consider the following:

The high prices of new drugs is claimed to be necessary to pay the huge costs involved in the research and testing that by law has to precede the launch of a new drug. - But this 'justification' rings very hollow to me, a steroid victim.

The British National Formulary is a reference book doctors are assumed to use to look up important information about the drugs they prescribe. - For well over 20 years certainly, and maybe even longer, sodium retention has been among the side-effects listed for the drug that made me a steroid victim. - Because of this side-effect of sodium retention, all patients who are prescribed this medication, or any other of the many medications that result in sodium retention, should be warned not to eat salt or food containing added salt/sodium while taking the medication. - I was not given this VITAL warning and I do not know of even ONE person who was given this warning! - In consequence there are scores of thousands of steroid victims in this country - made needlessly and gravely ill and disabled because they were not given a simple piece of information, which surely, is the very reason that for all the expensive testing... - What use, then, all the testing? all the vast expense? all the laboratory animals that suffered to provide information for the researchers? - ARE ANY OF THE MANY, MANY DOCTORS WHO PRESCRIBE STEROIDS (INCLUDING PREDNISOLONE AND HRT) ET AL IN THIS NEGLIGENT WAY COMPETENT TO PRACTISE? - NOT IN MY OPINION. - THEY ARE CERTAINLY NOT COMPETENT TO PRESCRIBE OR TO MONITOR THESE DRUGS. - The drug companies themselves must have long known of the need to avoid salt while taking these medications and must also have soon become aware, as the numbers of steroid victims grew, that doctors were not giving the warnings, but there was no warning on the packs of drugs with which I was issued...

When is this scandalous situation going to be remedied? - My MP, Nick Clegg, wrote to the Secretary of State for Health about it last year but received only complacency in the response from Andy Burnham, and no promise of any action. See Individuals and agencies who are responsible for the 'Obesity Epidemic' - I hope you will read the whole page.