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NHS SOS

Raymond Tallis (Editor),

Jacky Davis

4.30 · Rating details · 73 ratings · 11 reviews

The Coalition Government passed into law an unprecedented assault on the NHS. Doctors, unions, the media, even politicians who claimed to be stalwart defenders failed to protect it. Now the effect of those devastating reforms are beginning to be felt by patients – but we can still save our country’s most valued institution if we take lessons from this terrible betrayal and ...more

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Paperback, 256 pages

Published July 5th 2013 by Oneworld

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Jan 20, 2014 Zanna rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Zanna by: Simon Wood

The focus here is on excavating the disaster of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 which effectively flung wide the flood gates to privatisation of the NHS. Since the disaster has happened, you might wonder what the point is, but the cautionary tale is a particularly stinging one. Politicians loyally served an utterly cynical corporate agenda with shameless lies and distortions, and the press failed totally to hold them to account, obediently trotting out accusations against hospitals, doctors, ...more

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Jan 14, 2015 Karan rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

As I write this review, my medical compatriots are struggling to treat the sick (and the not-so-sick) who are overflowing the A&Es nationwide while private outfits and healthcare ventures are acquiring contracts running into millions (even as the first privately run hospital admits its failure). I got a few hours to trace the source of current misery to an incredulous health policy "redisorganisation" that transpired merely 30 months back, that of passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. As I write this review, my medical compatriots are struggling to treat the sick (and the not-so-sick) who are overflowing the A&Es nationwide while private outfits and healthcare ventures are acquiring contracts running into millions (even as the first privately run hospital admits its failure). I got a few hours to trace the source of current misery to an incredulous health policy "redisorganisation" that transpired merely 30 months back, that of passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Being a recent, obviously elated medical graduate of that year who joined the medical workforce, I remember dedicating an awful lot of time reading endless stream of vacillating editorials, half-hearted post-mortems and trivia-driven, context-free reportage in the popular and the medical press. None of it however made the Bill, the eventual Act that passed and its implications any clearer. I lost interest as everyday commitments of being a young clinician took over and the curiosity to have the bill's legalese spelt out and discussed fell by the wayside. Moreover, despite being an active member of BMA (with a new BMJ copy through the door every weekend), I did not see any sustained campaign against the bill, any persistant alarm-calls that would mobilise or alarm me out of my stupor. I kept on conducting ward rounds in overcrowded hospitals, joining the team's sighs at the medically fit patients taking hospital beds as there was nowhere to discharge them what with the rapidly declining and funding-strapped social and community care networks. With no nurses to sometimes change patients into their gowns during my many A&E on-calls (forget basic, important observations), overworked and badly tempered senior nurses, screens glaring red with patients breaching four hour targets, I quickly started seeing A&E as the coalface of humanity where no respite from attendant chaos was in sight. I had the benefit of seeing one of my favourite emergency medicine consultant- a stickler for perfection, a pedant with a P, running like a headless chicken managing acute patients, firing lessons at his juniors eventually resign under myriad of pressures from non-medicos whose concept of medical treatment is little beyond a conveyor belt stream of "attend patient, fill a proforma, send for scan/bloods, prescribe or operate and/or discharge in no more than fifteen minutes".

To give context of the gossamer of misery that the current NHS hospitals are, I was relieved on finding a book like NHS SOS . I was familiar with Prof Tallis' oeuvre in neurology and his Hippocratic Oaths, a sort-of prequel to this I had read and reviewed in the spring of 2012. One of the book's foremost triumphs is it's spelling out of the most outrageous clauses of the Bill: the revoking of responsibility of the Secretary of the State to provide healthcare for all and how the repeal of this basic accountability for nation's health set the first stone to the path of privatisation. The second most readable part for me was seeing the hidden true anatomy of the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs)-derivatives of American insurance providing outfits, with an execrable attached patchwork of monitoring pseudo-structure conceptualsied and run by American consultancy firms which has completely supplanted the Primary Care Trusts, Strategic Health Authorities/Health Boards.

In nine pithy chapters, eleven authors write a convincing expose of the current politicians who expectedly get unmasked as blatant profiteers with little interest in national health, the supposedly neutral media organisations which are hand-in-glove with the Establishment in driving up opinion of fringe approval as mainstream and driving down criticism and real denunciation from medical professionals at all stages, and finally the anaemia, impotence and complacency that has run amok amidst trade unions and royal colleges supposedly representing the medical establishment. With all the supposed buttresses of population's health and welfare corroded and corrupted by short term munificent agendas, with every passing page, the nationalised health service with its foundation tenets and lofty humanist goals seemed more and more like a modern-day anachronism that I was surprised had not dismantled sooner.

The answer for this lies probably with the steady work of doctors and nurses who besides applying themselves everyday in treating people, believe in the health service's founding mission. The politicians around them keep burning them out by dropping ridiculous, additional grids made of managers and targets, commissioning and contracting; keep finding new spinwords like "patient choice" to sneak in private companies which they have personal stakes in, and have slowly but surely turned hospitals into businesses, community health and social care networks into markets. The full impact of this grotesque transformation is slowly going to unveil as more private contractors who have found their feet through the doors desert or de-register patients with chronic illnesses. Already, cancer-patients are finding erstwhile-available treatments being off-limits due to drying up for funds. The familiar spin of NHS-being-a-black-hole with unending financial needs and the inevitability of privatisation in the face of "improving technology" and "increasing elderly population" will drown all debate. Profits, expectedly will supercede any obligation to provide healthcare for all as sensible models of delivery will languish either in unlearned golden years of history or unread, new white papers. If there is any barrier to this already-commenced decimation, it probably is in a mass awareness and campaign.

Of course, like all viewers of agit-documentaries and all readers of agit-non-fiction, unless you are sympathetic with the authors' train of thought, incredulity and ethos, this will pass you by without much effect. For those sharing the authors' concern, much future caution, alertness, and future campaigning will be required to douse a fire that has already been started by the ConDems. The book has certainly given me some confidence to follow the continuing narrative of this national mismanagement, and I hope to keep the bud of political conscience alive even as I maneuver through the unrelenting stress of career-building and treating patients in a rapidly transforming and despondent working environment. ...more

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Jan 04, 2014 Simon Wood rated it it was amazing

DEFORMING THE NHS

"NHS SOS: How the NHS was betrayed - and how we can save it" is a collection of writing on the Coalitions NHS deforms ably put together by Dr Jackie Davis and Prof Raymond Tallis to enlighten the general public on what the implications of the reforms are, a task that the mainstream media have unsurprisingly failed to accomplish.

After a short foreword from Ken Loach, and an introduction to the book and the issues covered by Raymond Tallis, we have John Lister's (see "Health Poli DEFORMING THE NHS

"NHS SOS: How the NHS was betrayed - and how we can save it" is a collection of writing on the Coalitions NHS deforms ably put together by Dr Jackie Davis and Prof Raymond Tallis to enlighten the general public on what the implications of the reforms are, a task that the mainstream media have unsurprisingly failed to accomplish.

After a short foreword from Ken Loach, and an introduction to the book and the issues covered by Raymond Tallis, we have John Lister's (see "Health Policy Reform: Global Health Versus Private Profit") opening chapter "Breaking the Public Trust" which makes clear that the Coalition has absolutely no mandate for their "reforms" (it was in neither parties manifestos nor in the coalition agreement) and summarises the main thrust of them which is far from the GP led health service that has featured so prominently in public discourse.

Stewart Player (see "The Plot Against the NHS" & "Confuse and Conceal") in "Ready for the Market" looks into how the NHS was re-engineered over many years to the stage where it could be essentially consumed by private sector interests. He is perhaps a little confusing though undoubtedly this reflects the ad hoc, underhand and opportunistic nature of the private sectors penetration of the NHS. In "Parliamentary Bombshell" Dr David Wrigley charts the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary progress of the Coalitions Health Bill, revealing the arrogance of power, and if anyone was in any doubt, the spineless supine-ness of Shirley Williams.

Dr Jacky Davis and Dr Wrigley go on in "The Silence of the Lambs" to dissect the actions of those who are supposed to represent Consultants, Doctors and Nurses (the BMA and the Royal Colleges) and tells a story which at best paints them as naïve in their engagement with the Coalition, and at worst as complicit, undemocratic collaborators. Retired GP and former Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Dr Charles West's "A Failure of Politics" reports from inside the Liberal Democrat camp, and makes crystal clear the manipulative, duplicitous and undemocratic nature of the parties parliamentary leadership. West also takes a look at conflicts of interests within parliament, noting that 70 MP's and 142 Peers have interests in the private health sector, probably a somewhat higher ratio than one would expect amongst voters, and perhaps indicative of who these MP's and Peers really represent - not the people but private interests.

Oliver Huitson, a co-editor of the British section of the OpenDemocracy website (& contributor to "Public Service on the Brink") examines the lamentable record of the media's coverage of the Coalitions Health Bill. The focus is on the BBC's poor performance, including its practically non-existent coverage of the conflicts of interests of those Peers and MP's connected to the private health sector, and their endless regurgitation of Coalition slogans in lieu of informed analysis, not to mention labelling industry funded "think" tanks as independent! Even the Mail and Torygraph come out better (but not by much).

Prof Allyson Pollock (see "NHS Plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care") and David Price dissect the Coalitions Health Bill in "From Cradle to Grave" and make clear its implications: the destruction of the NHS, power devolved onto unaccountable private bodies who may ration treatments and choose patients at their pleasure. Those parts of the NHS that the private sector is not interested in (eg. Mental Health) are to be transferred to Local Authorities, the very same Local Authorities who have faced the biggest spending cuts under the Coalitions Austerity Regime (basically a feel-good name for an off the IMF shelf Structural Adjustment Program). Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis finish with an excellent guide to saving the NHS from destruction which includes many resources and contacts for those who wish to fight back against this miserable and mendacious Coalitions policies. This is a book that Id strongly recommend, in particular to those in England as the NHS in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is thus far free from the most pernicious aspects of privatisation, though as a precautionary measure it is no doubt relavent in those countries too as doubtlessly once the private sector has their snouts well and truly in the NHS trough they will look to expand their operations over the borders. ...more

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Apr 07, 2020 Graeme Johnson rated it it was amazing

Essential read for anyone in UK who still wants a free health care system.

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Mar 09, 2017 emma rated it it was amazing

This book should be required reading for everyone who's ever used, may ever use, or knows someone who may ever use the NHS. I cannot overestimate its importance in cutting through the propaganda to reveal the disgusting sell-off of our greatest institution - by successive governments over the past three decades - for the benefit of those in power and their revolting cronies.

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Sep 05, 2013 Charlotte rated it really liked it

The NHS was created when the country was in post-war bankruptcy. This book explains how and why it is currently being dismantled unnecessarily. It goes into the 'thirty years of preparation, during which successive administrations undermined the values and assumptions that had made the NHS possible while at the same time seeming to uphold them.'

Why is the NHS being rotted from the inside out?

'The answer of course is political, not financial. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland still have an NH ...more

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May 11, 2014 Grace rated it it was amazing

READ READ READ

"The story told in these chapters in one of barefaced lying and hypocrisy; of a contempt for the democratic process within national and local politics, and within professional bodies; undeclared conflicts of interest that would make Transparency International blush; and failures within the media to expose politicians' real agenda for the NHS and to inform its audience about a matter of such supreme importance."

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Jul 13, 2013 Mike O'Brien rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites

I urge everyone to read this book. It argues, via carefully referenced articles, that the NHS has been deliberately and systematically prepared for privatisation. Whatever position you may take on this matter, this book raises some important issues which both supporters and detractors of NHS reforms need to address.

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Dec 31, 2014 Grace Kelly rated it it was amazing

Very informative. It's not too hard to read either, the chapters are set out nicely. If you think the junior doctors dispute is bad, read this, and you'll finally understand where the problems are in the NHS, and who started those problems.

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Apr 21, 2014 Lemon rated it it was amazing

A really in depth and critical analysis of the "truth" behind the recent NHS privatization which has gathered much media attention.

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Feb 18, 2014 Karen rated it liked it

Worth a read

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About Raymond Tallis

Raymond Tallis

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Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world.

Born in Liverpool in 1946, one of five children, he trained as a doctor at Oxford University and at St Thomas' in London before going on to be Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world.

Born in Liverpool in 1946, one of five children, he trained as a doctor at Oxford University and at St Thomas' in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford. Professor Tallis retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer, though he remained Visiting Professor at St George's Hospital Medical School, University of London until 2008.

Prior to his retirement from medicine to devote himself to writing, Raymond Tallis had responsibility for acute and rehabilitation patients and took part in the on-call rota for acute medical emergencies. He also ran a unique specialist epilepsy service for older people. Amongst his 200 or so medical publications are two major textbooks - The Clinical Neurology of Old Age (Wiley, 1988) and the comprehensive Brocklehurst's Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology (Harcourt Brace, co-edited with Howard Fillitt, 6th edition, 2003). Most of his research publications were in the field of neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation. He has published original articles in Nature Medicine, Lancet and other leading journals. Two of his papers were the subject of leading articles in Lancet. In 2000 Raymond Tallis was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research; in 2002 he was awarded the Dhole Eddlestone Prize for his contribution to the medical literature on elderly people; and in 2006 he received the Founders Medal of the British Geriatrics Society. In July 2007, he received the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing, and in November 2011 he was honoured with the International League Against Epilepsy's Special Excellence in Epilepsy Award. He is a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Over the last 20 years Raymond Tallis has published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. Together with over two hundred articles in Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and many other outlets, these books offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be a human being. For this work, Professor Tallis has been awarded three honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon. Causa) from the University of Hull in 1997; LittD (Hon. Causa) at the University of Manchester 2002 and Doc (Med) SC, St George's Hospital 2015. He was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Liverpool until 2013.

Raymond Tallis makes regular appearances at Hay, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and other book festivals, and lectures widely.

Raymond Tallis's national roles have included: Consultant Advisor in Health Care of the Elderly to the Chief Medical Officer; a key part in developing National Service Framework for Older People, in particular the recommendations of developing services for people with strokes; membership of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee; Chairmanship of the Royal College of Physicians Committee on Ethics in Medicine; Chairman of the committee reviewing ethics support for front-line clinicians; and membership of the Working Party producing a seminal report Doctors in Society, Medical Professionalism in a Changing World (2005). From July 2011 to October 2014 he was the elected Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD).

In 2012 he was a member of the judges' panel for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

In 2015 he judged the Notting Hill Essay prize. ...more