the service is dependent on a locul cheinist who calls twice a day.
The above service is on hand for 1300 a week per bed, plus extras for surgery. If you want an ambulance from Heathrow to London, private practice will lay on one for 418 one-way, which makes even the taxi firms' fees appear reasonable.
Having justified all this in the terms of providing a service the BUPA 1OU TWIT bosses are warning that insurance will have to go up so we can increase the price of our beds".
Of course there is another and more swish bracket of private medicine which does provide a more deJuxe standard. Just opposite Lords Cricket Ground is the C5 million Wellington Hospital.
The Wellington has something of an internacional flavour. Jts £65-anight rooms are populated by British capitalists. Arab oil sheiks, and American tycoons. For S100 a night you can have a suite which some guests take as an extra. Being popular and well-loved people, they need the extra rooms to house their bodyguards.
Just to ensure that the clients do not feel peckish, the Wellington puts on optional extras like smoked salmon sandwiches at £2 a time.
No doubt all the doctors in these private centres took the Hippocratic Oath, but their business-like methods of operation indicates that they thought it sounded nice on graduation day but it should not be taken too seriously in the hard world of busin ess.
Many doctors will baulk at that criticism and will claim that they have to carn a living and that means getting the hest possible return they can for their hire. Well they have a point. As long as capitalism and the profit motive exists, medical care can never be a genuine social service.
A CHOICE But doctors have to make a choice. As long as they operate like business pcople they forleit all right to claim that they are rendering a public serv. Ice.
When they turn their backs on the great mass of people who need their skills in order to perform for the rich they are no different from any other capitalist exploiter, except in the excent ot their hypocrisy.
The idea of medicine is to serve, and that is an excellent idea. But it can only be fuily realised when medicine is separated from the sordid considerations of the capitalist mon cy-making marker.
Socialism is the only system which will give doctors the right to practice their skills in a full, creative and socially useful manner. In a socialise society the contradiction between look ing aller the medical needs of every one and clambering aboard the gravy train will be abolished, Because the needs of people will be primary, the resources of society will be axed to advance medical knowledee and that will be a good society for doctom and patients:
The choice for doctors is stark. They can cither art as buccaneers, fogging their merchandise to the highest bidder, or they can place themselves on the side of those who are fishting for a working class solution to the crisis in the NHS.
Not: Pennington hospitals. dangerous.
INDUCING BIRTHS fil in with hospital schedules. ional Health Service mean more than crumbling hospital buildings, chronic stalf shortages and the closures of wards, casualty departments and local depression!
They also lead to a regime in the hospitals which acts against the patients. Health care and the whole life of patients is ordered to suit adminstrative convenience - particularly the medical profession rather than the needs of individual patients. This pm can and often does result in techniques being used which are positively One of the worst examples of this is tus mercass use or metoos of inducing births. Originally induction techniques were designed for women who could not go into labour natur ally. Now the same techniques are more and more being used to ensure that women give birth at times which Ten years ago only 14.6 per cent of births were induced. Now the fig ure is nearly 50 per cent. This is not because these lechniques are safer for the mother or the babies. The evidence points clearly to the fact that about 3 times as many induced babies need special care compared with natural births. For the women it involves greater physical and menDemonstration against the closure of Liverpool Road Hospital in Islington rupture of the womb and the more frequent use of surgery to increase the size of the vagina. Not to mention other 'side-effecte such as severe The "normal' routine of inducing hirths in most hospitals shows the real reason for the increased use of this procedure. The women are given a drip of the birth inducing hormone (oxytocin) eariy in the morning to accelerate the onset of labour so that they can give birth between 2 and 4 It is at this time that the largest number of nurses and staff are on duty because of the overlap of shifts. and therefore most patients can be dealt with. In other words, except for a very shore period every day the number of staff is totally inadequate to attend to even the busic needs of These shortages are of course due to the miserable pay and conditions of work of bospital workers which are a result of the cutbacks in the funding of the NHS. The increasing use of these induction methods is nothing but the abuse of a medical technique in order to cover up the increasing inadequacies of the health The worst effects of the crisis of the NHS are being borne by women. The local hospitals already threatened with closure are mainly those serving working class women and the curs in meant that most of the projected health centres wich could give proper pre and post-natal care have been axed.
A lot of doctor probubly a maj ority- support the use of induction techniques, Gynaecology has always been an area of medicine shrouded with myths, hypocrisy and prejudice, all cultavated and encouraged by the medical profession.
Instead of fighting for more res ources for the health service, doctors have used the mystique surrounding their profession and their jealously guarded monopoly of medical knowledge to serve the needs of hospita routine. The needs of the patients are blatantly subordinated to adrumistrative convenience and the doctors requirements, The use of induced births shows that doctors are quite prepared to force patients to accept tratment that increases health risks in order to paper over and adapt to the curs in NHS expenditure.
The fight to defend the NHS and extend the health service into a comprebensive service which genuinely meets the needs of working class pat lents is not just a battle to get more money - vital as that is It also losolves a struggle to break down the mystique of medicine and a strupale to break the reactionary privileges of the doctors which are an obstacle to medical advance
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