July 2025 Blog

The Doctors andDentistsReview Body, reporting 1st April, has been used by governments for years to hold down the pay of other groups.
JUnior Doctors pay has decreased by 20% since 2008-to repair thisshortfall costs29%Not a pay increase-a pay correction...
Doctors will emigrate, take early retirement or quit if they cannot afford their exam fees, rent, electricity and gas... No hope of a mortgage, £100k student loan debt!!!

Doctors and Dentists are a special case-
cost to the NHS is only £1.73bn, after tax returned, £920m
(half of one % of NHS budget.)

Saying "lower pensions for more pay"

many will leave the NHS before pension; the NHS may be destroyed by then, why should pensions be cut?Any NHS worker who tolerates NHS conditions til 65 deserves a goldplated helicopter...

IEA policy is “anybody can do medicine”
"Shorten Medicine course"
"PAs can do anything"

The government want to rewrite the Medicine Act

Training places should be given to UK born JDs for GPs first
Fund practices to hire enough GPs-not bribe them to use PAs through ARRS fund
Restore GPs funding
Restore GPs pay to full pay restoration: Pay GPs first, then reimburse practice costs which now rise because of NHI rises, wage rises, gas, electric, broadband charges…

Ban PAs, AAs
FPR for frontline Nurses, Doctors, Midwives

More beds

Better Social Care. Discharge pods to free up real beds while awaiting care plans, places

Stop taskification, Doctor replacement by dangerous PAs, AAs
Stop Community hubs stuffed by PAS
Stop NHS app over development

Re jig ACCURX to log in, saved details
Stop privatisation, outsourcing: NHS money going to private profiteer mates

Increase nurses, Doctors, beds

Stop closing hospitals Stop privately; owned diagnostics

Improve A & E
More seats, Dr s, Nurses, proper facilities
Care secretaries who can inform progress

Provide enough GPs to reduce A&E demand,
Reopen Walk-in Centres

Starmer and Streeting's 10 year plan is pie in the sky

Increase prevention is obvious: ban smoking, ban fatty foods, ban excess alcohol, promote exercise

but needs more PR, more nurses, Doctors, Specialist PR advisors, trainers

More digital apps: many cannot use ACCURX, NHS app-trying to do everything through a singl appis insanity

No money, no delivery

Relies on Darzi hubs: too expensive, Drs do not want to work there

Inconvenient on High Street

privately owned, privately run for profit. Boots win, patients loose.

Dr Julia Grace Patterson: EveryDoctor...The most important NHS news of the week: 9th July!

Tony Blair’s institute weighed in on the NHS 10 year plan…

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change released their commentary about the NHS 10 year plan on Monday, and I thought I would flag up what they think! There has been long standing curiosity (and well-founded concern) about the influence of Tony Blair and his institute over Keir Starmer. An article last Summer from Politico mentions the financial link between Blair’s institute and the tech sector. Here’s a quote:

“Tech billionaire Larry Ellison has pledged a total of $375 million over the years for Blair's think tank. Ellison's cloud computing company Oracle is in one of the sectors benefiting from an AI boom and has a commercial interest in digitizing health records, another of the TBI’s key recommendations to governments.”

This is… concerning, I think we’ll agree…

Because of Blair’s influence, I’ve been paying close attention to the reports published by his institute for the past year, and several have certainly looked as if they seek to influence the Labour government in key policy areas. Their new commentary about the 10 year plan is very positive about private partnerships (here’s a quote):

“if the NHS is to remain at the forefront of innovation in the era of artificial intelligence then it must partner more effectively with private enterprise. It cannot possibly hope to develop the necessary range of digital services in house.”

..which is concerning. Tech advances do require the NHS to partner with private companies, just as pharmaceutical advances require the NHS to purchase drugs from private companies. But these reports never seem to highlight the need for a fair relationship. NHS private partnerships are heavily tipped in favour of the private companies benefiting. They can exit NHS contracts if things don’t work out, often the costly and cumbersome work is left to the NHS while they cherry-pick the profitable bits, and the profits that some of these companies are creating are extraordinary and should be capped. The Tony Blair Institute, unsurprisingly, fails to mention this.

It’s clear within the commentary that the institute has been heavily influential within certain key policies within the new NHS 10 year plan. It also looks like the “doctor in your pocket” idea, which has attracted a lot of media coverage, stemmed from them. Here are a couple of quotes:

“Two Tony Blair Institute for Global Change policies on data have been included in the plan: a single patient record, or digital health record (using data to impact direct patient care), and a health-data research service (using data for R&D).”.

“Another critical ingredient for disruptive delivery is intelligent navigation: the use of AI to support patients access the right care first-time when unwell. This is another TBI policy that has been adopted in the ten-year plan. Initially for use in the triage and navigation of patients seeking care, this feature could eventually become the proposed “doctor in your pocket”.”

..and here’s an article about the “doctor in your pocket” plan from The Guardian, in case you haven’t read about it yet:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/03/labour-nhs-app-hospital-league-tables-10-year-health-plan-wes-streeting.

So. It certainly looks like Tony Blair and his institute’s ideas are being listened to, which I find very worrying. I’ll keep paying attention to their reports and ideas and will let you know what I find.

New resident doctor strikes in England?

In case you didn’t know, “resident doctor” is the new name for “junior doctor”. And it was announced yesterday that resident doctors in England have voted for strike action, to continue their fight for pay restoration. All of the relevant info, about the enormous pay erosion that resident doctors have endured since 2008/2009, is available here. The British Medical Association (doctors’ largest trade union) have explained all of the facts and figures.

There’s already a lot of negative reporting about these potential strikes, because politicians try to turn a strike into a moral position from healthcare workers (or any public sector worker fighting for fair working conditions). The reality is, doctors have suffered much more significant pay cuts than other sectors. John Burn-Murdoch wrote about this for the FT in 2023, and his piece contains this line:

“The recent inflation rise has taken the average British worker’s real wages down to 2.5 per cent below their 2009 level, but earnings are down 13 per cent for nurses and 24 per cent for junior doctors over the same period.”

Many new doctors now come out of medical school with £100,000 in debt. They are expected to move around a lot, they miss important events like friends’ weddings in order to work unsocial hours, they study very hard and spend thousands of pounds of their own money in order to pay for exams which are essential if they want to progress in their training.

Do I like the idea of patient appointment cancellations? No, of course not. I hope it doesn’t come to that, and the negotiations between doctors and the government prevent the need for any striking. But we have to remember that the doctors don’t want to go on strike either. They just want to be paid fairly. Many countries with similar economic positions pay doctors 2-3 times as much, and we’re losing a lot of brilliant doctors as a result, who move abroad. If the government wants to rebuild the NHS and ensure that the service delivers excellent care for patients again, they need to wake up and start valuing the staff!

Patient safety review from Penny Dash

There has been a slew of articles about a safety review carried out by the new Chair of NHS England, Penny Dash. Dash is a former doctor and then became a senior partner at the huge private management consultancy firm McKinsey where “she led McKinsey’s healthcare practice across Europe and supported improvements in health and care in multiple parts of the UK, wider Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and North America.”, according to the NHS Confederation’s website.

Dash’s appointment alone raises alarm bells for me, because management consultants have been dubiously beneficial to the NHS. Some research in 2018 indicated that management consultants actually made hospital services in England *less efficient*. Anywho, Dash is seemingly very concerned about various NHS safety “quangos”. An article from The Times includes these two quotes:

“Six NHS safety quangos will be abolished or overhauled after a review found that healthcare regulators were failing to prevent thousands of avoidable deaths each year.”

…and

“A review published on Monday by Dr Penny Dash, the chairwoman of NHS England, found that there had been very few improvements in patient safety over the past decade despite £60 million being spent each year.”

I doubt I need to point out to my readers that over the past ten years, the NHS has been woefully underfunded and under-resourced. I suspect that these organisations have been swimming against a rising tide of patient safety problems, caused by the intentional and wilful neglect of the previous Conservative governments.

Are there enormous patient safety problems in the NHS now? Yes, absolutely. It’s one of the reasons I do this work. Patients are being profoundly failed. But have these safety organisations caused the problems? I very much doubt it. They were a band-aid applied to a gaping wound, and unsurprisingly have not worked very well. Perhaps overhauling or binning the organisations will save money, but it won’t fix the underlying problems.

Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and assorted leaders seem keen to tell us that they’ll create efficiencies, without actually spelling out what their plan will actually entail next. I’ll let you know what happens next (apparently over 200 NHS-related organisations will be axed in total by this government in their reforms…).

And that’s that! I’ll be back in touch tomorrow evening with an important newsletter about the NHS 10 year plan, AI, and private companies (eurgh). And tonight I’ll be running an online event between 8-8.30pm, running through the info above and having a chat with lots of my lovely subscribers. You’ll receive an email invite just before the event starts!

In the meantime, take care, stay cool, and thank you so much for all of your support,

Dr Julia Patterson

https://justtreatment.org/news/2025/7/7/i-was-deemed-too-complicated-to-be-treated-by-a-private-health-provider