Labour's time is “running out” over NHS, BMA leader warns

The BMA's leader has warned the new Labour government that its time is running out to provide a better health service.

In his opening address to the BMA's annual representative meeting in Bournemouth this week, the chairman of the BMA council, Dr Ian Bogle, said the next 12 months were crucial.

He saw “a demoralised, disenchanted, dejected, but certainly not defeated profession.” And he warned the prime minister “not to denigrate and abuse us, not to blame those of us who work in the health service for the deficiencies of the health service, not to disparage or dismiss our concerns.”

Reminding his audience that four years ago health professionals had been enthused with optimism by Labour's promises of regeneration, Dr Bogle said that four years on things could not get much worse.

GPs were retiring in their 50s, and over half had signalled their readiness to consider resigning from the NHS; applications to medical schools were down; there was a recruitment crisis in academic medicine; and the number of consultant vacancies had risen by 40%.

Doctors, he said, were under siege from intolerable workload pressures and had become the scapegoats for the failings of a system with grossly unrealistic expectations. “The time is fast approaching when we will have to ask ourselves whether we are prepared to go on soaking up the pressure, filling the gaps where there are doctor shortages, and racing through four minute consultations wondering afterwards whether we missed something.”

Before the last election Mr Blair said that he would make health “a cause and a crusade” for the next five years. But Dr Bogle said that he did not have five years to stop the rot. He had to restore the goodwill of doctors; stop the fires of “anti-doctor” publicity; and recognise the importance of time with patients.

The chairman criticised the health secretary's “shockingly hysterical reaction” to the Alder Hey inquiry's report into retention of body parts when he compared events to what went on in Nazi Germany in the 1930s as “unforgivable.” He believed that the way that the Alder Hey doctors had been treated was disgraceful.

The BMA still has anxieties about the GMC. Dr Bogle warned that doctors would not support an incomplete model of revalidation that left questions about appraisal and specialist registration unanswered, and it would not support a new GMC structure that was unrepresentative and undemocratic.