The chairman of the BMA’s Consultants Committee has criticised lists of “banned treatments” on the NHS, and warned that cuts to services were being driven by “the quest for wholesale reductions in budgets”.
Urging consultants to go back to their hospitals and “prepare to protect patient services”, he commented: “Under pressure to achieve up to £20 bn of efficiency savings by 2014, NHS Trusts in England are compiling lists of treatments to be decommissioned or reduced. These lists are clothed in the language of evidence but they represent target reductions based on cost and volume, sometimes ignoring the potential benefit to individual patients. “Consultants must be involved in the discussions that lead to local service reductions. Painful though it is, we cannot stand aside and let the debate be conducted between management consultants and finance directors,” he concluded.
