Friday 20 January
In my last blog, I told you I was in
Belfast on Wednesday for New Year 2012 Academic Meeting of the
RCPsych in Northern Ireland. Lucy Thorpe, Head of the Policy Unit,
and I had a fantastic day and we learnt a great deal. In
particular, I've brought home two themes to pursue: one around the
impact of alcohol on all citizens, and particularly those with
mental illness across the UK; the other, how we could come together
more around suicide prevention strategies. I also hope that via one
of the Academic Faculty Executive members, I have stimulated the
Academic Faculty to come back to me with the nuts and bolts of what
we should be doing as a College, to ensure that there is a future
generation of doctor-psychiatrists who are excellent researchers,
leading the field. I wish to pursue this because I believe it to be
really important. For those of you who didn’t read it, this was
part of my election pledge and statement.
You never know what you are going to arrive
back to when you land at Heathrow. And of course I watched the 6
o’clock news, which informed us that, not unexpectedly, the Royal
College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives are now
opposing the Health and Social Care Bill. Next week, I plan to send
out a final survey about the Bill to our members. I realise I risk
survey fatigue, but this matter is so important - not only to
all psychiatrists and health professionals in England, but to those
in the rest of the UK because of potential knock-on effects.
Yesterday, I met with one of the Secretary of
State’s special advisors about the Bill. I hope that our
discussions will lead to reassurances that the consistent concerns
we've expressed about the Bill are being listened to, and that
there will be some concrete, measurable outcome arising from the
huge amount of work we have done to evidence our concerns.
Whatever the outcome of this piece of
legislation, I think it is very important to stress that the Bill
itself has been (not wishing to in any way be accused of plagiarism
by taking the words of Professor Nick Craddock!), a wake-up call
for the NHS and all health professionals. And whatever the outcome
of ongoing discussions, our College will continue to do its work on
clinical commissioning. We now have a much firmer and better
relationship with the Royal College of General Practitioners, we
are solidly embedded into the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges,
and we will not waste anything that we have learnt. The future of
the NHS, which clearly has to now be in partnership with the
independent sector, the voluntary sector, and social enterprise, is
so important.
I had intended to make an early start this
morning to compose a letter to The Psychiatrist, in
response to what I thought were excellent papers by
Dr Laurence Mynors-Wallis and Dr Phil Sugarman on the Health
and Social Care Bill in a previous issue. But clearly, by the time
such a letter would be accepted and published, it will have lost
its meaning. What I do want to stress is that if you brought
together the best in both those papers, including where there was
consensus, this would give us a framework from which the College
could play its full part in ensuring that we are able to deliver
best mental health services to all patients, and to drive up and
improve public mental health.
I have been asking myself the
question: Is the Health and Social Care Bill fundamentally
flawed? We, as doctors, have an obligation to practise least harm.
Therefore I hope you will be patient with me, and respond to what I
promise you will be the last survey on the matter.
Sue
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