NHS Gravy Train – The Closed-Shop Policies & Vested Interests = Patients Suffer


NHS = National Health Scandal 
In the media the NHS is portrayed as caring and doing its best under difficult circumstances (usually a busy A&E department) but in reality its problems are self inflicted and caused by squandering billions of pounds due to ineptitude, poor management, medical blunders, bloated bureaucracy, vested interest, fraud, corruption, inflated drug prices and inflated salaries & bonuses which can be seen in the BBC documentary ‘Can Jerry Robinson fix the NHS‘ while at the same time actually attacking whistle-blowers and blocking successful treatments which could help reduce the ‘numbers in treatment’ and saving billions of pounds, it’s a National Health Scandal.

The people who manage this broken system always want more money throwing at it but without fixing the underline problems they have created, there is even talk now of an additional ‘NHS tax’ to further fund this broken system although everyone already pays 11% National Insurance which already funds the NHS. But the NHS doesn’t need more money it needs a radical overhaul to stop wasting billions of pounds.

This is the perfect analogy for how the NHS operates: 
“The NHS held a boat race against a Japanese crew. After Japan won by a mile, a working party found the winners had 8 people rowing and one steering while the NHS had 8 steering and one rowing. So the NHS spent £15 million on consultants, forming a restructured crew of four assistant steering managers, three deputy managers and a director of steering services. The rower was then given an incentive to row harder. They held another race and lost by two miles, so the NHS fired the rower for poor performance, sold the boat and used the proceeds to pay a bonus to the director of steering services.. – That is what is happening all over the place. There is masses of bureaucracy in the health service and a denial of what people need.” Tony Benn MP Nov 1995.

‘The NHS is the last of the communist-style command-economy state organisations, the largest employer in the free world with 1.5 million employees (who need something to do daily to justify their existence), paid for by a cheque from the Chancellor, managed by a central government ministry, dictating everything from what drugs to prescribe to what meals to serve, through the daily issuing of thousands of targets and initiatives that are baffling even to those who are supposed to carry them out. The failure of the politically controlled, state-funded NHS is sadly as inevitable as the failure of the politically controlled communist economies. The NHS is the best-intentioned organisation in the world, but then the problem with communism wasn’t lack of good intentions. It was bad results.

We need to strip away the ideology and look at the successful systems that combine public and private, payments and insurance, such as in France, Germany and the Netherlands. We should have wide social insurance schemes that repay – in all or part – the cost of treatments to patients, allowing them to choose which doctor they go to and which hospital they are treated at. Doctors and hospitals, whether state or private, should publish figures on their success rates and woo patients to gain the money they bring with them, rather than take them for granted. There should be charges for GP visits so people don’t abuse them, and to give doctors an incentive to make it easy to see them.

If people want gold-star treatment, they should be able to top it up with cash payments, not be forced out of the system. There should be a safety-net, ensuring the insurance premiums of people on low incomes are always paid, so we don’t have the problems of uninsured poor people as they do in the US’.

If you really want to understand how bad the NHS system is at delivering healthcare then Observer health editor Anthony Browne, once a passionate believer in the NHS, tells why he now feels it can never work and is only kept alive by wrong-headed idealism.

To understand how modern medicine got to where it is today, you also need to know about a school teacher called Abraham Flexner, Flexner was not a doctor and had no medical training, yet he is one of the most influential people in medicine that no one has ever heard of.

In 1910 he published the book-length report Medical Education in the United States and Canada which is now known as the Flexner Report. And, the rest, as they say, is history.

Flexner aligned medical education under a set of norms that emphasized ‘laboratory research and the patenting of medicine’ — both of which would serve to further enrich the people who funded Flexner’s 1910 report: John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others. Rockefeller’s goal was to dominate the oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical markets.

Health journalist S.D. Wells stated “Five score and two years ago, a man named Abraham Flexner was hired by John D. Rockefeller to evaluate the effectiveness of therapies being taught by medical colleges and institutions, with the ultimate goal of dominating control over pharmaceuticals. With partnerships including Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan, a new “doorkeeper” would exist to influence legislative bodies on state and federal levels to create regulations and licensing “red tape” that strictly promoted drug medicine while stifling and shutting down alternative, inexpensive natural remedies. Those medical colleges and institutions that did not submit to this superpower of regulation were crushed and put out of business”.

Flexner helped pave the way for a medical monopoly that persists to this day. Modern medicine has become such a systemic force that labels everything else as ‘nonsense’ fueled by the pharmaceutical propaganda machine as their drugs are patented, they’re expensive and controlled by a select group of companies and government agencies for great profit usually at the expense of personal health and wellbeing.

Now on to the NHS…

The NHS is not the best healthcare model nor is it the ‘envy’ of the world as claimed as the Netherlands tops health care rankings, with UK in 14th place in the EU and in 18th place in world rankings. A new report comparing European provision claims the ‘Beveridge’ NHS model is doomed. According to the report authors, the results show the flaws in health care systems like the NHS model, known as the Beveridge system, where the financing and provision of health care are handled within one organisation.

The other type of system, the Bismarck system, is based on insurers who are organisationally independent of care givers and health care providers. This is the case in the Netherlands, Germany (ranked ninth) and Switzerland. “The Netherlands example seems to be driving home the big, final nail in the coffin of Beveridge health care systems, and the lesson is clear: remove politicians and other amateurs from operative decision making in what might well be the most complex industry on the face of the Earth: health care,” wrote the report authors.

“Beveridge systems seem to be operational with good results only in small population countries such as Iceland, Denmark and Norway.” They added: “Large Beveridge systems seem to have difficulties at attaining really excellent levels of customer value. The largest Beveridge countries, the UK, Spain and Italy, keep clinging together in the middle of the index.”

The authors said there could be at least two explanations for the poor performance of the larger Beveridge countries. The first, they suggested, could be that public organisations do not offer the compensation and other incentives required to recruit the type of “world-class” managers needed to handle such a large organisation effectively. The other could be political interference getting in the way of decisions that should be focused on the patient.

Pay-outs for medical blunders now 60% of annual NHS budget
Pay-outs for medical blunders have reached such a peak that they represent around 60 per cent of the UK’s annual spend on healthcare. If the full £65bn compensation is paid to the families, the National Health Service (NHS) could be bankrupted, doctor groups have warned. Shocking toll of NHS drug errors: Up to 22,000 deaths a year caused by medication mistakes and dose blunders.

Badly Run
NHS bosses who cover up serious failings could be banned from taking another hospital job to end the ‘revolving door‘ of failed NHS managers simply moving to other NHS jobs.

Hospitals are paying £1million a year to ‘efficiency experts’ who are actually making things WORSE.

Top doctors win battle to keep ‘unfair’ £77,000 bonus: Hospital consultants fight off bid to strip them of rewards which costs the NHS £320m a year. The scheme costs the equivalent of 12,000 nurses or 33,000 hip replacements.

NHS crisis? What crisis?: Hitting the champers after a hard day on the slopes of a très chic ski resort…400 doctors take a break from NHS’s worst winter emergency at a medical conference – bankrolled by YOU.

Compensation claims draining the NHS of £1.6bn a year: Number of payouts for treatment blunders has doubled over the past decade.

For example: A “catalogue of failures” resulted in the collapse of an £800 million NHS contract to outsource care of older and mentally ill people, the Commons spending watchdog warned.

Treatment and funding shambles costs thousands of lives as progress ‘stalls’ on tackling the disease in Britain

Coroner also accused the NHS of a ‘blatant disregard for the truth’.

A sickening whitewash: Fury as NHS boss who spent £10m to silence whistleblowers faces no action – as there is no accountability.

Draft guidance, issued by NHS England, follows a series of scandals exposed by the Daily Telegraph, when health officials were found to be in the pay of drugs firms while NHS Trusts have suspended 3,477 staff in the financial years 2013-14 to 2015-16 on full pay costing the NHS £28,497,343. ‘The NHS is seen as a ‘cash cow’ by many of its employees who abuse the service in any way possible’, said one critic.

Drug firms will be barred from extortionately raising NHS drug prices as Jeremy Hunt acts to close loophole 10mg tablets of steroid Hydrocortisone – up by 12,500 per cent from 70p in 2008 to £85 in 2016 – 50mg of anti-anxiety drug doxepin up from £5.72 to £154 a packet since 2011 – Cyclizine 30mg tablets, used to treat nausea, up from £9.57 to £353.06 a packet, ‘it’s complete and utter abuse’ said a source.

Pfizer fined record £84.2m for overcharging NHS 2600%.

NHS overcharged by 12,000% for hydrocortisone tablets by drug company Actavis, CMA claims

There are two worlds in the NHS: policy and practicality. Half of the NHS is shiny and full of well-meaning but incompetent planners. The other bumbles on with changes dreamed up 10 years ago. As one source said ‘I really fear for the NHS. It seems full of incompetent managers who fail and just get moved around to other hospitals. As for making decisions they haven’t the competence to do that and that is why they are recruited’…

Industrial Scale Fraud & Abuse
There isn’t a single NHS executive who can justify why they should earn more than the Prime Minister but the number of NHS bosses earning more than the PM has doubled in the past 3 years. More than 600 NHS quango chiefs are raking in £100,000 salaries with one in six earning more than the Prime Minister. Two highest-paid bosses earn £240,000 at time of unprecedented funding crisis!

For example, a shamed NHS health boss on £240,000 a year who presided over a failure to investigate hundreds of unexpected deaths should be sacked or should quit, suggested Jeremy Hunt yesterday.The Health Secretary said managers who showed a ‘lack of judgment’ should ‘move on’ and not be allowed to ‘resurface somewhere else in the NHS on huge pay packets’ as is the normal policy in the NHS.

However NHS bosses completely ignored the Health Minister’s advice and create a non-job for her, she was given a new job in the same hospital but later lost the £240,000 job created just for her after outcry by the public and patients and will still receive £190,000 as her settlement package, the trust said. Critics last night attacked the trust for offering “a completely unjustifiable reward for failure” .

Another NHS boss is being paid £115k for NOT working by cash-strapped hospital Trust while the man brought in as cover has also received £190,000 in taxpayer funded wages, ‘it’s horrendous abuse’ said a spokesman.

Former NHS trust chief faces jail after she gave £20,000 of taxpayers’ money to her husband’s company.

A failing hospital paid NHS chief £1m a year… to cut costs after overspending by more than £30m in 2014.  Tim Bolot was hired to give money-saving tips to Medway Foundation Trust. But despite his tips, the trust became the first to go into special measures. The Trust also overspent by £31million last year and has crippling debts. Patient Concern has described salary as ‘mindblowing’ waste of vital cash.

Scandal of fat cat NHS hospital bosses who took home more than the Prime Minister last year – despite many trusts plunging into financial crisis

The revolving door for NHS managers: 3,200 get pay-offs… then return in new jobs

Fraudster scientists who billed NHS sites, including Basildon Hospital, for 14,000 hours of non-existent work are ordered to pay back £500,000

We first became aware of ‘serious problems’ within the NHS in 2006 when our successful treatment methods were ignored or blocked by NHS personnel as they were seen as a ‘threat to jobs’, rather than a ‘much better treatment method’ to help clients stop smoking, stop drinking and stop using drugs.

The standard policy and truth is, NHS managers are incentivised to ignore problems. This is putting the ‘needs of the service’ before the ‘needs of the patient’ however this is the reality of how NHS bosses and management control the NHS.

Evidence emerging in 2012 to 2013 illustrates how the NHS is failing some patients who are lead to believe they are receiving the best care when in fact, they are receiving the type of care that ‘safeguards a failed service’.

The NHS is a great idea but it is controlled by ‘vested interests’ which means patients are being denied access to better treatments just to protect failed departments (smoking cessation, drugs & alcohol) from closure. This is illustrated by a Mid Staffs medical director who criticised NHS managers and doctors’ for ‘self-preservation’ as doctors are ‘turning a blind eye to poor practice to protect their own jobs’.

The Health Service Journal reported ‘Whenever there is any attempt to change anything that might improve the service to patients doctors start to worry about the effect on the change on their unit or practice. So much of the noise from doctors regarding any change has more to do with protecting their unit’s budget or their income. Where are the ethics & morals in that?

Now some 7 years after we first reported about the culture problem in the NHS, this question is finally been addressed: How do we create a climate that puts the needs of patients first?

  1. Whatever treatment is available on the NHS there is usually a ‘much better treatment’ available privately, so why doesn’t the NHS just provide the best treatment?
  2. The simple fact is the NHS ‘blocks better treatments’ to safeguard jobs and protect failed departments from closure.

Needs of the Service First Not the Patients
The existing ‘culture’ of the NHS is, it is not run in the best interests of the patient, it run in the best interests of the staff who block and avoid change as it is seen as a threat to jobs and not an opportunity to improve patient care. Until this ‘culture’ is changed some patients will continue to receive the type of care ‘that safeguards the department’ and not the actual care which is ‘best for the patient’. The NHS is run for their benefit not yours.

Whatever treatment is offered by the NHS there is usually a much better ‘private’ treatment option available with much better patient outcomes so why doesn’t the NHS simply provide the better treatment option? In reality the NHS intentionally provides inferior treatments as ‘better treatments’ do not retain people ‘in treatment’ and the NHS needs a certain amount of ‘sick people’ to keep the system going and to justify the need for 1.4million employees who represent 70% of the £115bn running costs of the NHS, hence the slogan, Save ‘our’ NHS.

For example, the companies that can’t help are awarded the drug and alcohol contracts to maintain the status quo, while the companies that can help are blocked or ignored and explains why NHS success rates are just 5% to 7% per annum for those who simply ‘complete the course’ but are not drug-free as the services they commission are simply ‘drug and alcohol maintenance services’ which do not work and are a pure waste of £1.5 billion pounds per annum of tax-payer money. The real success rate is 0% as no one is drug-free but it keeps the problem going so they can all profit from the NHS gravy train, as the NHS is run for their benefit and not the poor people who are maintained ‘in treatment’ which doesn’t work.

Our treatment is much cheaper, easy to administer and has far superior patient outcomes and could save the British economy up to £36bn per annum yet it is blocked to maintain people ‘in treatment’ so NHS personnel can profit from the addiction cycle, if a treatment like ours can be so easily blocked with much superior patient outcomes and huge financial implications what chance do other smaller ‘better treatments’ have which are simply better for the patient but not the personnel?

A leading doctor and author of ‘Doctors, Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy‘ explains the problem and says ‘his profession has totally misunderstood addiction & continues to perpetuate the myth to protect its own existence’. He says: ‘the addiction services have grown so massively they have developed a survival instinct and are not looking for a cure, in short, the bureaucracy of addiction needs clients far more than clients need the bureaucracy of addiction’. As a result, ‘a self-serving, self-perpetuating and completely useless alcohol and drug bureaucracy has built up to deal with the problem’ which is apparent by their low success rate of just 3.6%, click here to read his full article.

Extrapolate this problem across the entire NHS and one can begin to see the scale of the abuse. People wrongly ‘assume’ that if our treatment was so successful the NHS would use it however they have no idea about how the NHS operates and how it controlled by ‘vested interests who profit and protect jobs at the expense of patient care and successful patient outcomes’.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: ‘Doctors can use their clinical judgment to prescribe ANY treatment that will benefit their patient, even if it is outside its licensed indication and an absence of NICE guidance is not an acceptable reason to refuse funding treatment. The government is committed to increasing patients’ access to innovative new drugs and treatments’. But at the local level, GP’s and the CCG’s simply ‘ignore’ this advice and carry on using the same failed services to keep the problem going.

‘The Conservatives would be making a mistake if they thought doctors would be allies in reforming the NHS. He cautioned that they acted like any other vested interest and ‘had stood in the way of all the reforms’. An investigation also reveals top doctors routinely get £1,000 overtime for 4-hour shift hence why they want to appear over worked.

This observation gives reason for two questions:

  1. Unlike other professionals, such as airline pilots, lawyers, systems engineers etc, working for large organisations, doctors are unique in being allowed to run side jobs without the explicit permission of the main employer. What is the reason(s) for keeping that?
  2. What could be done to give doctors “normal” professional employment conditions, i.e. a salary and any extra energy spent on working harder (yes, and making more money) for their main employer, instead of disappearing to their side practices, frequently leaving large hospitals standing idle for lack of key personnel?

‘An investigation was in response to Parliamentary and public concerns over the risk of conflicts of interest influencing local NHS commissioners’ decisions in ways that favour secondary interests, such as personal gain, over patients’ interests’. GPs given control of NHS budgets paid their OWN companies £2.4bn of taxpayers‘ money, major investigation reveals. Hypocrisy of webcam GPs: Despite complaining of recruitment crisis, doctors’ leaders urge them to earn £90k from private sessions online.

Failed Service 
The Francis report into the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal shows the sheer scale of the ‘culture‘ problem but provides solid foundations for changes in the management, clinical practice of the health service and an opportunity to implement the Mid Staffs inquiry’s 290 recommendations. But Civil servants ‘neutered‘ the Francis report into 1,200 deaths at the Mid Staffordshire hospital trust to protect the Head of the NHS over his role in Britain’s worst-ever health scandal, an expert said.

The head of the NHS Sir David Nicholson has now admitted the NHS has ‘lost its focus’ and patients are not at ‘the centre of the system’ and the ‘health system has failed’.

Pressure has increased on Sir David Nicholson to resign after it emerged £15m has been spent on gagging hundreds of whistleblowers designed to protect the failed culture. Labour was accused of suppressing damning reports revealing a ‘culture of fear’ in the NHS five years ago which critics say could have saved lives.

40% of health service workers would not recommend their own hospital to friends or family, a poll has found. A further one in three do not believe NHS managers act on the concerns of patients.

The terrible outcomes at Mid Staffs were the logical consequence of a disastrously flawed management system that systematically forces people to face in the wrong direction, counts the wrong things, and focuses management attention on the wrong part of the job. The NHS takes 10 years just to implement a ‘better treatment’ or a better system of working, as it is steeped in monolithic bureaucracy’ and ‘monumental incompetence’.

New Model for Success
A good example of how changing incompetent management can transform a failed hospital can be seen at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, where a private firm has ‘transformed‘ a failing NHS trust. The first NHS trust to be operated entirely by a private company has recorded one of the highest levels of patient satisfaction in the country. According to new figures, patient satisfaction has risen to 85 per cent, placing Hinchingbrooke in the top six of the East of England’s 46 hospitals. It was previously recorded one of the lowest rankings. The hospital had been expected to lose £10 million last year, but this has been reduced to just £3.7 million.

Open Access 
In addition, a report confirms ‘the NHS needs to slash its red tape and use therapists from the private and voluntary sector to allow people more choice, improved services and equal access as the NHS reliance on a narrow range of therapies is a ‘disgrace’ that fails nearly 90% of NHS patients’.

The same is true for many other NHS services:- a report was highly critical of the NHS’s handling of diabetes sufferers, saying the organisation had ‘failed to hold commissioners of diabetes services to account for poor performance’ and that ‘the performance of eleven primary care trusts had gotten worse between 2006-2010’.

Tax-Payer Funding Failure 
In effect, the tax payer is wasting £billions every year on funding NHS failure to protect ‘jobs and failed services’, instead of referring patient for successful private treatment or commissioning those successful treatments, NHS bosses prefer to retain patients ‘within the NHS framework’ so their departments don’t suffer (decline) however critics say ‘this policy is not in the best interests of the patients who are suffering needlessly’.

For this reason alone the NHS needs to be reformed as it cannot carry on in its present form which wastes too much money. If you really want to know the scale of the problem in the NHS then you should read the book ‘Squandered‘ by David Craig.

Squandered: How Gordon Brown is Wasting over One Trillion Pounds of our Money by David Craig
Undoubtedly the book’s most depressing section is the early chapter on the NHS, a saga of bloated, worthless management, filthy hospitals, overcrowded wards and political indifference that will surely do wonders for the private healthcare industry.

It is appalling to read, for example, of a hospital so dirty and degraded that an outbreak of the bacterial infection C Difficile killed 90 people, while patients with diarrhoea were told to “go in their beds”. This after £269 billion extra spending since 1997. Spending on the NHS is £95billion a year, an increase in real terms of 87 per cent since 1997. Labour has spent £269 billion more on health than if they had kept funding at 1997 levels. 

Poor survival rates
Cancer survival rates are 20 per cent higher in France, Germany, Spain and Italy than in the UK. Death rates from strokes are 30 per cent higher here than in other European countries. This means that at least 30,000 of the 200,000 people who die each year from cancer and strokes would survive elsewhere in Europe.

Dirty hospitals
We have 300,000 cases of hospital acquired infections each year, 50 times more than some other European countries. Cases of MRSA almost doubled between 1997 and 2004.

Quango explosion
Since 1997, New Labour has set up the Health Protection Agency (which oversees public health matters including the threat of bio-terrorism  –  at a cost of £252 million a year, staff of 3,042), the Healthcare Commission (an independent assessor of NHS standards which costs £80 million a year, staff of more than 500).

Monitor (which regulated Foundation Trusts at a cost of £13 million a year), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (which regulates nurses at a cost of £23million a year, staff of 242), the NHS Confederation (a body which aims to influence health policy at a cost of £26 million a year), and the National Patient Safety Agency (which monitors patient safety in the NHS at a cost of £30million a year, staff of 309).

More bureaucrats
NHS staff numbers have risen by 20 per cent since 1997, but the number of pen-pushers has doubled. Meanwhile, the number of beds has fallen, so in ten years the NHS has gone from having 12 beds per manager to five beds per manager. We now have half the number of hospital beds per 100,000 people than France or Germany, with the result that they are often full, leading to much higher MRSA levels.

Drug rationing
About 50 people a day lose their sight to age-related macular degeneration because the NHS refuses to fund the drugs required to treat them. In 2007, 100,000 sufferers from Alzheimer’s found that the NHS would not pay a pound;2.50 a day for the drugs to keep their disease at bay.

Contract madness
NHS managers and ministers negotiated a pay deal with GPs which gave them a 63 per cent salary increase, while allowing many of them to stop working outside limited surgery hours.

Fraud
NHS fraud is also costing the tax payer £3billion a year, with millions being paid to NHS doctors and dentists who ‘invent’ shifts and fake treatments. A dentist conned the NHS out of £1.4million with thousands of false claims – including fitting false teeth on patients who were actually dead. Joyce Trail filed more than 7,000 invoices for work she had never done and used the money to travel around the world.

Cancelled Surgery
Hospital waiting times are a key measure of success for the NHS. But do the official figures accurately reflect the reality for patients across the UK? In many cases operations are cancelled just to meet waiting time targets, while foreigners coming to the UK for operations dubbed ‘health tourism’, is thought to cost the NHS as much as £200million a year.

Widespread NHS Failure 
The NHS can be world class service and is very good at providing some healthcare services such as operations, accident and emergency, maternity care, organ transplants etc however it is also very bad in other areas such as dealing with Alzheimer’sAlcoholDementiaDiabetes,Dieting, Drugs, Epilepcy, Early Pregnancy, IVF, Mental Health, MSSchizophrenia, Smoking, Over 50’s, Varicose Veins and many other areas.

Turned into drug-addicts by their doctors, then abandoned by the NHS: The people driven to the brink of suicide – by pills designed to treat depression.

For drug and alcohol related issues, its services were rated as ‘dire’ in 2009 and ‘woefully inadequate‘ in 2012 with a 4% success rate which is same as doing nothing or ‘no treatment at all’ but cost the tax payer £1.5bn per annum.

Drug treatment services should clearly be handled by outside specialist providers who have much better results and far higher success rates but NHS bosses pursue anti-competitive practices often for no valid reason to protect their service rather than using outside specialists. A leading think-tank Civitas has confirmed ‘patients suffer’ because of this negative ‘closed-shop’ policy to block patient choice and their access better treatment providers. Clearly this is putting the ‘needs of the service’ before the ‘patient’s well-being’ but this is the present policy of NHS bosses who need to commission better treatments.

NHS Barriers – Patients Suffer 
Most people would like our treatment to be available on the NHS but the system is designed to protect failed NHS services by blocking private treatments and not promoting or encouraging them:

the NHS needs to slash its red tape and use therapists from the private and voluntary sector to allow people more choice, improved services and equal access
GP’s told to block private providers to safeguard NHS services, regardless of treatment outcome
NHS protectionism excluding private providers & better services
NHS closed-shop & monopoly policies
NHS barriers to competition
NHS pursue anti-competitive practices
‘NHS family’ freezes out other healthcare options

Ultimately, patients suffer as they are not receiving the best treatment available they are being forced to use NHS services regardless of the fact they are not the best option available and don’t work for most people.

The truth is, successful private treatments are ‘excluded to protect failed NHS services which would close if patients had a fair choice about where to be treated’ however the money saved could be used to pay for effective treatment elsewhere but this doesn’t happen due to the NHS closed-shop policy which means ‘patients suffer’. In effect, the taxpayer is funding massive NHS failure.

For example: In 2006 we detoxed a patient for the NHS on 80mls methadone per day in just 5 days supervised by their staff, in their premises. At the end of the successful treatment we were told by the drugs workers ‘we don’t see how we can dovetail your treatment into our practices’.

The patient was John Williams, John was back in work within 1 week of finishing his detox. His doctor the Clinical Director said “I was very impressed and intrigued by the treatment you gave to one of the patients I see. He reduced his dose from 80mls to 0mls in a matter of five days.. He told me that he felt better and was sleeping better during his rapid reduction”. Since 2006 our successful detox treatments to help people stop smoking, stop drinking or stop using drugs have been ignored by the addiction services even though we have contacted the NTA and the 150 Drug & Alcohol Teams throughout the UK numerous times, offering our assistance.

There are 11,000 drug workers looking after 207,000 registered addicts ‘in treatment’. This means each drug worker is responsible for just 19 people a month, with a successful detox treatment there would be less addicts and therefore less drug workers, so they ignore or block successful treatments to maintain the status quo. In Feb 2010 Iain Duncan Smith said ‘it was unacceptable that only 4% of addicts in treatment ever get “clean” and accused the agency of “pushing aside” proper rehabilitation’.

A leading doctor and author of ‘Doctors, Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy’, Dr Dalrymple explains why: ‘addiction services have grown so massively they have developed a survival instinct and are not looking for a cure, in short, the bureaucracy of addiction needs clients far more than clients need the bureaucracy of addiction. As a result, ‘a self-serving, self-perpetuating and completely useless alcohol/drug bureaucracy has built up to deal with the problem’ which is apparent by their low remission rate of just 3.6%, click here to read his full article.

Prescriptions for alcohol problems have soared 46% in the last 10 years but alcohol related deaths have also risen by 40% as the ‘NHS methods’ used to help people stop drinking do not deal with the core issue and do not work in general. In fact, a Health select committee of MP’s has branded NHS alcohol treatment services in the UK as ‘dire’ with a success rate of just 1% to 2% because NHS bosses ignore new or innovate treatments to pursue anti-competitive practices often for no valid reason, an official review says.

The same scenario is true for the thousands of ‘stop smoking advisors’ who can’t actually stop anyone from smoking but ignore any successful treatments that can to protect their jobs. The NHS is full of ‘vested interests’ which block or protest about any changes to the working practices or attempts to introduce new or better treatments to improve patient outcomes hence why patients need more control over their treatment options and why the NHS needs radical reform.

Failed NHS Services 
Most people would like our treatments to be available on the NHS but NHS bosses in the addiction services have ignored treatments that are too successful to ‘safeguard jobs’ by operating closed-shop policies which restrict patient choice backed up by GPs who have been told by their union the British Medical Association to actively block private treatments to ‘protect NHS services’ even though they have been in almost ‘continuous decline’ over the last 10 years. As ‘people trust their GP and will listen to their advice’ this is an area of grave concern.

As a result of this ‘protectionism’ there has been little to no fresh innovation in NHS treatments to help people stop smoking, stop drinking or stop using drugs in decades and they are actually ‘the worst performing’ with minimal success rates of just 12%, 2% and 4% respectively, so these problems continue to escalate as they have done for the past 30 years, as ‘the culture of the treatment services focuses on the ‘need of the service’ before the client’s progress and ‘rewards for the retention of clients’, which means more funding, bigger departments, more jobs and greater bonuses for ‘seeing’ more patients but without any real success.

The truth is, failed drugs and treatments are ‘promoted’ to retain patients because they don’t work for most people while much safer and more successful treatments are ‘ignored’ – to protect jobs. The practice of ‘retaining patients by ignoring successful treatment’ is endemic throughout the NHS. In the meantime, patients continue to suffer and are simply being used to protect these failed NHS services that in the commercial world would have closed decades ago.

For example: Would you pay £400.00 to attend NHS smoking cessation to be given nicotine patches? Then if you had not smoked for 14 days while wearing the patch, be recorded as a ‘non-smoker or successful quitter’? – Nobody would not pay £400.00 for this type of service hence why NHS smoking cessation services are not ‘commercially viable’ and would close if they were not funded by the tax payer. But the tax payer is not getting value for money as it costs approximately £160 million per annum to fund this ‘useless and ineffective’ service which could be spent on more successful treatment.

The Addiction Challenge
The addiction services have massive failure rates and ignore successful treatments however this ‘closed-shop monopoly’ costs the tax payer £1.5billion per annum for smoking, alcohol and drug services which ‘do not work, have poor outcomes and bad results’ this is wasteful and irresponsible at any time, even more so in the current economic climate.

In an effort to break this monopoly, get greater value for the tax payer and better treatment for patients we welcome ANY challenge to test our treatment methods against any ‘evidence based NHS clinical treatment’ for smoking, alcohol or drugs because they do not work. The test would be carried out over 10 days at the end of that period the individual would be dependence free and not reliant on any replacement medication. The NHS challenge has been in effect since January 2007 and no clinician, GP, scientist or medical professional has come forward to take part so they can continue with the same failed ‘non-treatment’ methods which are responsible for ‘prolonging the problem’ while wasting billions/millions of pounds every year on failed NHS services that in the ‘real world’ would cease to exist.

The NHS costs the tax-payer £115bn per annum so it is not a free service and everyone should care about how their money is being spent or more importantly wasted and/or squandered. Most people ASSUME the NHS would automatically use a treatment because it was successful, however they would be wrong.

Stifle Innovation
Most people think the NHS is an open, innovative and welcoming institution that approaches problems with a ‘can do attitude’ that would welcome new ideas/treatment with a sense of ‘possibility’ and what ‘could work’, however this is not the case. The NHS is a closed-shop who stone-wall innovation and ignore or block new ideas as they see them as a threat to jobs rather than an opportunity to improve results or costs, so NHS bosses pursue anti-competitive practices often for no valid reason, to block choice’, an official review says.

Most people do not know the ‘reality’ of how the NHS operates and how some successful treatments are ignored or blocked to protect failed NHS services as the NHS is controlled by ‘vested interests‘ while the patients ‘suffer’.

‘Treatments for use by the NHS should be independently assessed by a third party and not by the NHS department involved, this would stop ‘vested interests’ from blocking or ignoring new and better treatments’.

NHS Bias 
The BBC has reported on the bias against private care by the NHS to exclude treatments and now the Office of Fair Trading has now launched an investigation into these ‘unfair practices’ within the NHS. A leading think tank Civitas has also confirmed ‘patients suffer’ because the NHS operates a negative ‘closed-shop’ policy to actively block better treatments to ‘protect inferior NHS services’ which have been in almost ‘continuous decline over the last 10 years. Read their full report ‘Refusing Treatment’ here.

Fraud is also costing the taxpayer £5.7billion a year, with millions being paid to NHS doctors and dentists who ‘invent’ shifts and fake treatments.

Coding practice is also being used by hospitals to prop up their finances. ‘I have one patient who goes daily for monitoring of her pregnancy. Because it’s done on the delivery suite she’s charged as an admission, but it’s an outpatient procedure. That one patient has cost the commissioner £30,000, and it should only have cost a matter of a few hundred’.

Although spending on the NHS went up by over £40bn in the last decade, productivity in hospitals was in ‘almost continuous decline‘ during the period which also contributed to an appalling level of waste because they focused too much on meeting targets, according to a report by the Public Accounts Committee.

‘It’s is all too easy for the NHS department affected by a new treatment or therapy to block or ignore it to
maintain the status quo’.

Broken NHS Guarantee
The promise of the NHS was a simple guarantee: no matter who you were, it would be seen to that you got the best available care – but this is no longer the case.

In the NHS, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to ‘care about’ or to ‘cut costs’ or to ‘improve efficiency’ and a ‘chronic lack of common sense’. In the NHS, ‘success’ is based upon ‘numbers’ and the number of people seen and NOT the results of that treatment, as one would assume, therefore NHS departments want ‘problems’ to get ‘bigger’ to see and ‘retain’ more patients, rather than being successful and releasing patients. As NHS success is not based upon results, no one cares what the results of treatment are they just want to see more patients to hit targets.

Patients Suffer 
What does this mean to you? Patients are not been given the best treatments, they are being used to keep failed NHS services open that in the commercial world would have closed years ago. Basically for the NHS to improve it needs more competition.

But the Co-operation and Competition Panel (CCP), the government body that investigates competition issues in the NHS, has found that patients are losing out as a result of restrictions on their choice of provider of NHS care.

‘The monopolists want to suppress competition from alternative suppliers and hide behind their professed love of the NHS as their excuse. On the other side are critics who argue that the best way to encourage high standards and value for money is to promote pluralism so that the best ideas can emerge from comparison of one provider with another. The Government must not lose its nerve by turning its back on competition or watering down the role of Monitor’, according to the head of the NHS Confederation’s private companies network.

NHS management consultant Paul Corrigan says ‘I have always understood why parts of the NHS resist competition. If you are in a monopoly position it means that you can look inwards and feel in charge of the world that you see. No-one can come up with an important innovation from outside that will turn your cozy world upside down. You are in charge of your own pace of change’.

Real Reason to Block Choice 
Efforts to introduce change and better treatments are continually blocked even the previous government tried to crack down on ‘vested interests’ in the NHS including GP leaders who were seen as blocking Government reforms. More than 200 GPs earn over £250,000 a year while thousands earn more than Prime Minister.

‘GP’s are private businesses with NHS contracts but they don’t want any competition from other private businesses
in the NHS, so do the best they can to block any reforms to give patients more choice’.

An unidentified GP from Kent is believed to be reaping the benefits of a new contract after earning that allows doctors to run several surgeries that rake in NHS cash for providing extra treatment after earning £770,000.00 in one year, critics said ‘this explains why GP’s don’t want competition in the NHS, they want to provide ‘services’ themselves at higher prices’. This can include minor operations, tests for diabetes or help for drug addicts. This is the real reason for blocking competition and patient choice, said one critic.

Current Health Minister Simon Burns said: “We expected resistance from the BMA over our proposals to create a fair playing field to give patients more choice of provider. They have previously opposed this under successive governments’ as 66% of GPs say THEY will be worse off if patients have more choice.

Myth of Evidence Based Medicine 
Critics say ‘private treatments for addiction or dependency are blocked from NHS use by the medical profession who claim they are not evidence based or scientifically proven however only about 15 per cent of medical interventions are supported by solid scientific evidence; in other words, 85 per cent are not. All the evidence proves their ‘evidence based methods’ do not work while ‘evidence based medicine is not restricted to randomised trials and meta-analyses. It involves tracking down the best external evidence with which to answer our clinical questions’.

Dire Treatments 
A Health select committee of MP’s has branded NHS alcohol treatment services in the UK as ‘dire’ but GP’s have been told to block independent alcohol treatments to ‘safeguard NHS services’ (regardless of their failure at 98%) and even though they are ‘dire’.

Ridiculous Schemes
A good example of how staff in the NHS like to ‘prolong a problem’ to justify their existence is the latest £75,000 scheme to give people with serious alcohol problems a mobile phone so they can keep in touch. Critics have slammed the scheme as ‘stupid, ridiculous and a waste of tax-payers money’.

Texting Better Than NRT 
The NHS were dealt an embarrassing blow when a study published in the Lancet confirmed simple text messages were more successful at 10.7% than nicotine replacement therapy at 6% in help people stop smoking however NRT costs the NHS £61million per annum. Glyn McIntosh, from the smoking cessation group Quit, which helped develop the text messages and recruit volunteers for the study, says: “We are delighted with the results and hope that text motivation will now become a standard part of the quitting process.” But critics said the scheme had been ‘hyped up and was another flop. When 89% of participants fail, it’s not a good scheme instead this money should be used to let patients use private stop smoking treatments which are much more successful’.

In another example: a study has confirmed smokers are losing faith in NHS smoking cessation services because they are ‘ineffective as their products are useless’ and ‘they do not work and are a waste of half a billion pounds of tax payer’s money’.

Serious Problem – ‘NHS Drug Bias’ 
Champix provides a clear example of two massive problems; a) GP’s and the NHS happily promote ‘hyped drugs’ despite all the evidence they are NOT ‘wonder pills’ but are extremely ‘dangerous’ and b) the NHS does not provide the best treatment options available. The truth is, drugs are ‘promoted’ while much safer and more effective ‘non-drug’ based treatments are ‘ignored’ – this scenario is endemic throughout the NHS.

The same applies to all NHS services for:

Addiction: Estimated No in Treatment Annual Treatment Budget NHS Success Rate
Drugs 320,000 £1.2billion 0% to 4%
Alcohol 1,100,000 small proportion of the above 0% to 2%
Prescription Drugs 1,300,000 none 0% to 1%
Smoking Cessation 758,000 £160million 6% to 12%

Critics say ‘the situation is ludicrous, patients are being denied access to treatment that do work to protect GP’s pay and NHS services which don’t work and are a waste of money’ while 82 per cent of patients polled would like to receive some form of complementary medicine on the NHS.

Not Value for Money 
It is widely acknowledged there is a culture of waste, inertia and inefficiency that is rife throughout the public sector. In the NHS there is enormous waste, staff can’t even buy basic items with care or consideration to costs let alone different treatment options and even efforts to improve hospital food were blocked. This was typified in the £11bn IT scheme branded a ‘farce and an utter waste of money’ by Ministers. While the King’s Fund’s Commission on NHS Leadership and Management finds – the NHS in urgent need of a new style of leadership.

Also there are too many people exploiting the NHS, including £8.00 for a bar of soap which is used once and thrown away, £1,000 for a 500ml bottle of salt water, £6,575.00 for oral ibuprofen for analgesia costing just 8p per gram, £175.00 for just 500ml liquid paracetamol costing less than £1.00 and hundreds of other examples, basically they are not getting any value for the taxpayer. A Public account committee reproves NHS trusts for wasting money on poor purchasing while making cuts elsewhere. In a report published on 20 May, the committee says the NHS lacks a “culture of efficient procurement”.

Free to Prescribe ANY Treatment 
We contacted the Department of Health regarding our treatments who said ‘decisions about what services, including non-pharmaceutical therapies, to commission or fund are the responsibility of the local NHS. The Department of Health does not maintain a position on any type of non-pharmaceutical treatment’. They also confirmed “doctors can use their clinical judgment to prescribe any treatment that will benefit their patient, even if it is outside its licensed indication’ and ‘that an absence of NICE guidance is not an acceptable reason to refuse funding treatment’. He added: ‘The Government is committed to increasing patients’ access to innovative new drugs and treatments’.

Protectionist
This problem is exploited at the local NHS level where GP’s have been told to ‘freeze out the private sector from healthcare, regardless of their outcomes’ to safeguard NHS services by their union the BMA to ‘strangle any healthcare reforms’ as the NHS has become more not less ‘protectionist’. They want to keep patients within their own financial control with thousands of GP’s earning more than the prime minister and some earning up to £500,000 per annum rather than referring their patients to more successful or cost-effective independent treatment specialists’ as a result of this policy, patients suffer, so it’s more about ‘vested interests’ than patient care.

Stop Smoking
It is a fact, the NHS smoking cessation service has the lowest success rate of any stop smoking method at just 6% to 12% per annum. But they employ thousands of quit smoking councilors, use million of nicotine patches, gum or lozenges and use other drugs such as Champix and Zyban but still only generate a 6% to 12% result. This total costs the tax-payer £160 million per annum, so it is NOT free.

In 2009/10 757,537 people set a quit date through NHS Stop Smoking Services. At the 2 week follow up it is claimed 373,954 people had successfully quit (based on self-report) and while still using NRT products. Total expenditure on NHS Stop Smoking Services was just under £84 million. The basic cost per quitter was £224 but these figures do not include expenditure on pharmacotherapy’s which is estimated at £200 per person giving a total cost of £424.00

NHS Allowance
Imagine you have an NHS allowance of £500 to pay for you to stop smoking and once the money has been used, there will be no other funding available. Would you spend it with the NHS smoking cessation services where they claim you have successfully stop smoking after 2 weeks while you are still using NRT products, or would you spend it on other treatments where you had actually stopped smoking and were not using any NRT products?

Now consider you contact the NHS smoking cessation service and say ‘I have a treatment which is up to 98% effective and does not involve any counseling or drugs’. Sounds great… but not if you’re the smoking councilor or drug company [vested interests].

The GP/councilor is asked to look into the treatment and offer an opinion, all they have to say is ‘it’s no good, it doesn’t work’ and based upon this biased non-assessment the treatment is blocked from gaining any further recognition and they are free to carry on with the same failing methods.

‘Treatments for use by the NHS should be independently assessed by a third party and not by the NHS department involved, this would stop ‘vested interests’ from blocking or ignoring new and better treatments’.

Job Protection – Addiction Services 
Apart from the thousands of stop smoking advisors who don’t better treatments, now imagine the same scenario with the 11,000 drug workers who work for the addiction services, costing the tax-payer £1.5billion per annum and they claim to have a 4% success rate but in reality it is ZERO%. They don’t want any new treatments which would be a threat to their positions and so ignore or block them to maintain the status quo as successful treatments would raise questions about their role and see job numbers dwindle. In Feb 2010 Iain Duncan Smith said ‘it was unacceptable that only 4% of addicts in treatment ever get “clean” and accused the agency of “pushing aside” proper rehabilitation’.

In December 2010 the government finally scrapped the failed 13 year policy of ‘harm reduction’ and now wishes to focus on ending dependency rather than just maintaining it. However this policy has already been undermined by those with ‘vested interests’. If any more proof were needed of the addiction services ‘ongoing failure’ it is the fact more than 21,000 drug addicts and alcoholics have been claiming sickness benefits for longer than 10 years, it has been disclosed.

This ‘vested interest’ policy is wasting billions of pounds for the NHS each year while patients who need real help suffer.

Lies, Damned Lies….and NTA Statistics
The only way to improve the results while using the same failed treatment options is to falsify them. ‘Those who can be bothered to read the self-congratulatory puffs emanating from the NTA, will not be surprised at this organisation’s latest foray into the wonderful world of statistical disinformation’.

Party Over
The only way NHS bosses will improve results is to hire or commission better treatments as the focus switches to ‘results’ rather than ‘maintenance’. However as NHS bosses are unable to achieve any meaningful results, many are taking early redundancy packages rather than going down with their sinking ship and being sacked for their poor performance as the ‘harm reduction’ gravy train comes to an end.

Pilot Schemes or Trials 
However, the NHS are free to carry out pilot schemes or trials to test ‘new treatments’ or even ‘ideas’ BUT certain departments choose not to if the treatment is a threat to their positions. The people who are asked to assess ‘new treatments’ are the very people who are also threatened by them and so they reject those which are ‘too successful’ to maintain the status quo and to safeguard their own jobs [protectionism].

Harriet Harman MP while Commons leader said ‘There was no ‘dishonour’ in experimenting with different solutions to ‘complex’ problems. That is the whole point of a pilot scheme – to find out if something works. There is no dishonor in piloting something to see whether it works and if it doesn’t work then acknowledging it and trying to press on and find out what does work’.

For example: expectant mothers will be taught to hypnotise themselves before giving birth as an alternative to painkillers in NHS trial and another trial for a weight-loss scheme to help NHS patients loose weight. The study of hundreds of British slimmers found those who went to a commercial slimming group for three months lost twice as much weight as those who were given diet advice by their family doctor.

But there is no requirement to pilot a treatment if they don’t want to, it is just ignored so they can carry on with the same failing methods which don’t work but keep patients coming back for another ‘try’ or maintain them ‘in treatment’ to keep themselves in work. It’s a complete cycle but this practice wastes at least £2bn per annum for the NHS which could be used for front line services.

This is reality of gaining NHS recognition, treatments which certain groups feel threatened by are simply blocked or ignored.

Photodynamic Therapy
We can draw a direct comparison between our treatment for addiction and dependency and a ‘laser’ cancer treatment called Photodynamic therapy or PDT which has been ignored for the last 10 years.

Very few people have even heard about PDT yet it is an approved NHS treatment and avoids the risks of surgery, cuts the use of hospital beds and removes the need for repeated hospital visits required by chemo and radiotherapy and could save the healthcare system up to £2billion pounds a year, according to estimates by cancer specialists at University College Hospital, London.

But due to ‘vested interests’ just 300 cancer patients out of more than 300,000 were referred for treatment last year, which is just 0.1%. Many patients have never even told about PDT or they are told (incorrectly) that it is ‘experimental and doesn’t work’, which are the standard tactics used to undermine or worse still attack treatments they feel threatened by.

However after 10 years, some cancer experts have now called for more NHS patients to be given this ‘pioneering’ (even though it is 10 years old) laser treatment as an alternative to surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy but little has changed.

As you can see, the NHS is very slow to respond to change regardless of how successful a non-pharmaceutical treatment is, indeed experts have warned about the NHS being left behind due to its slow-tech approach. Sir David Frost explains how he is ‘astonished and deeply troubled’ and how it is ‘impossible to understand the lack of or non existent support’ the NHS shows for breakthrough treatments.

Addiction Challenge
The addiction challenge was set up to improve patient treatment options and establish which method of treatment is the most efficacious with the best patient outcomes. We welcome ANY challenge to test our high-tech treatment methods against any ‘evidence based clinical method’ [low-tech] NHS treatment for addiction and dependency’ because they do not work.

The NHS challenge has been in effect since January 2007 and no clinician, GP, scientist or medical professional has come forward to take part.

Blocking Innovation
Blocking innovation is the ‘standard practice’ throughout the NHS by those with ‘vested interests’ who wish to maintain the ‘status quo’ hence why they were not consulted about the NHS reforms which were first outlined in June 2007.

We need a healthcare system which is open, fair, works for all and for the greater good to break the current monopoly, patient health is not a commodity which is mutually exclusive for those with ‘vested interests that want government to stay closed, opaque and easily captured’ Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

With just two examples of ‘protectionism’ and ‘vested interests’ we have shown how the NHS could save £4billion per annum, now imagine all the other departments where more successful treatments are shunned to maintain the status quo. The NHS needs to save £20bn over the next 5 years, this could be achieved by using better treatments in just two departments.

We will continue with our efforts to gain NHS recognition for our treatments to ‘help patients with addiction or dependency issues’ but please do not ASSUME it would be automatically used as treatments which are too successful are blocked or ignored at the local level by those with ‘vested interests’ who view them as a threat rather than an opportunity to improve patient care. Help us save the NHS.

‘Treatments for use by the NHS should be independently assessed by a third party and not by the NHS department involved, this would stop ‘vested interests’ from blocking or ignoring new and better treatments’.