Votes of no confidence in Johnson and Darzi
BMA News
12 June 2008
Family doctors from across the UK backed ‘no confidence’ votes in health minister Lord Darzi and health secretary Alan Johnson today (12/06/08).
GPs at the BMA annual conference of local medical committees, angered by plans for polyclinics in London and a GP-led health centre in each of England’s 152 PCTs, agreed they had ‘no confidence’ in the UK government’s ‘stewardship’ of the NHS, or in health secretary Alan Johnson.
The votes went against a call by BMA GPs committee chair Laurence Buckman for delegates not to declare ‘no confidence’ in named politcians, because he did not want opposition to government policies to be seen as criticism of individuals.
He said: ‘We might not like what he is doing but the [health secretary] is delivering policy on behalf of his government. We do not necessarily dislike the government either — we oppose the policy.’
Derbyshire GP John Grenville gave examples of ministerial confusion between the definition of what a polyclinic was – whether it was the same as community hospital or a GP-led health centre.
He said: ‘It is not that the left hand of the Department [of Health] does not know what the right hand is doing – most of the time the left hand does not seem to be aware that there is a right hand.’
He also told the conference that ‘reasonable ideas’ had been changed into ‘vote-grabbing sound bites’.
Kent GP Paul Hobday said: ‘This government is doing to the NHS what Ronnie Biggs and Reggie Kray did for law and order.’
GPs at the conference in London also backed a vote of no confidence in Lord Darzi and said that they did not believe his review of general practice, as set out in 'Our NHS, Our Future and Healthcare for London: A Framework for Action', was ‘independent of political control and free of a predetermined outcome’.