Published: 14/02/2002, Volume II2, No. 5792 Page 19
I was all set to get my first moment of total power over Alan Milburn by chairing a conference session at which he was the keynote speaker when he cunningly escaped my megalomania by pulling out because of pressure of work.
No guesses what that pressure was. Tony Blair had just faced down another Commons drubbing over The Sun's 'MMR: Blair is wobbling' claim that the prime minister was poised to concede the single-vaccine option.
In the atmosphere of media-driven hysteria, no amount of denials made any difference. For some reason The Sun is taken more seriously in Blairite Britain than the FT. This is chiefly Downing Street's fault: when the FT gets things wrong, it is roundly abused like the rest of us, but The Sun is cosseted like an eccentric uncle who might leave you something in his will.
Blair, Milburn, senior health officers and the vast weight of evidence-based global opinion were all ranged against dissident Dr Andrew Wakefield, the tabloids and the real wobble - middle-class public opinion. But it was an uphill struggle in which IDS and Dr Liam Fox claimed to be promoting grown-up discussion, but were not. An unwise return to 'voodoo politics', one Tory commentator called his leader's tactics.
As with Labour's internal row over that new health policy document, the fault lies partly with a malevolent media, partly within the party. I still blame the Blairs for fuelling the fear by not being frank over Leo's jabs: the privacy argument is unpersuasive for a baby.With a new Tory leader installed, and Blair vulnerable to 'he's always abroad' jibes, the weather-vane press, notably Rupert Murdoch's stable, is testing Labour.
But no one forced John Edmonds, the everexplosive leader of the GMB, to make quite such a fuss over a draft which described the NHS as 'providing largely comprehensive services, overwhelmingly free at the point of use'. After duffing up Mr Milburn on Friday, the unions are confident that neither 'largely' nor 'overwhelmingly'will be in the next draft.
Such is the small change of political warfare nowadays. So I was relieved to attend an NHS debate where neither party politics nor funding featured once. This was the New Health Network conference on 'the future hospital', to which Mr Milburn dispatched Lord Hunt.
I usually see these issues through the politics prism or as an NHS customer. It is striking to listen to a range of professional perspectives grappling with state-of-the-art IT - harnessed to the new biotechnologies to become a crucial agency of medical progress - or the best way to overcome local (parochial? ) resistance to hospital merger and reconfiguration?
As with Leo Blair's jab, we are talking individual rights versus collective rights here.
Philip Hunt (who examined the Kidderminster Hospital affair for the King's Fund in 1997 before he became a minister) admitted that 'the NHS is still not good at relations with the community'.
'It still goes through the traditional consultation process, where a decision has already been made and the consultation process is about legitimising that decision.'
Dr Sheila Adam, director of policy at the Department of Health, agreed, speaking of the NHS having a 'democratic deficit' at local level.Professor Ara Darzi, a surgeon, said hospitals had 'very badly failed' to engage with the public on local issues. NHS managers, suggested one contributor from the floor, are the most mistrusted people after politicians.
That may be over-generous to The Sun.But I was touched to hear people really struggling to get a grip on this. In their desire for close and convenient services, patients often underestimate the trade-off with better (but more distant) outcomes, said Dr Adam. Spot on.
But when it comes to the NHS's woefully inadequate IT, the conference encountered a familiar paradox.
IT reform will have to be driven from the centre, if only to impose compatible systems and protect IT budgets from being siphoned off for more 'urgent' needs.
But listening to a dazzling presentation from Professor Don Detmer, an American at the Judge Management Institute in Cambridge, explaining what wonders the information age and bio-informatics hold for medicine, is to be reminded that nothing - apart from A&E - is more urgent. As the man said, there will soon be no reason why we all shouldn't live healthily to 100 - and then wake up dead.
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