Labour's health policy.

Marks a retreat from ideology

The NHS presents the Labour party, as the next government in waiting, with a particularly difficult political challenge. On the one hand, the party's apocalyptic prophecies about the consequences of the changes in 1991 have been betrayed by events: the NHS has not disintegrated, nor has it been privatised. On the other hand, the party's commitment to financial austerity, should it be returned to office, inhibits it from buying support by making any promises about more generous funding. In the circumstances, the Labour party's manifesto on health, Renewing the NHS,1 is a remarkably skilful document. It signals a retreat from dogmatism and an acceptance of the need for a pragmatic policy under a smokescreen of ideological rhetoric.

The rhetoric is designed to reassure the party faithful. The manifesto evokes a mythical past when everything was splendid in the NHS. It describes a demonised present in which the Conservative government is corrupting the NHS's ideals. But the proposals are designed to reassure the public and the professionals working in the NHS. They turn out to be surprisingly modest, often building on the much denounced changes of recent years, largely cosmetic in character, and designed to allow scope …

The irony of the past decade is that the political debate about health policy has been marked by both growing acrimony and the emergence of a new consensus. The conflict has been about policy means: never in the history of the NHS has disagreement about how the NHS should be organised been sharper. The consensus has been about policy aims: a new agenda has evolved, to which all parties now subscribe. The elements of the new consensus are clear enough. They have a new emphasis on positive policies for health promotion, on shifting the balance from secondary to primary care, and on giving patients more rights. It is this agenda that shapes the Labour party's new health policy document, Your Good Health,' just as it has shaped the Conservative government's strategy.2 Perhaps the most instructive way of reading the Labour document, in search of enlightenment about what a change of government might bring, is to ask how the chosen policy instruments match the policy aims.
Consider, first, the Labour party's policies for health promotion. Here, clearly, there is common ground between the parties: the government is in the process of hammering out its own strategies.3 Labour's proposals are, in key respects, more specific. There is a pledge, for example, to ban tobacco advertising and to create a new right to a smoke free environment at work. There is a proposal to create a cabinet committee to coordinate all aspects of government policy on health. This symbolically underlines the recognition, permeating the whole document, that improving health entails dealing with the social and economic conditions that cause disease and disability. There can be no doubt about the commitment on this, as against achieving alternative policy objectives such as cutting taxes. The real question, of course, is whether Labour could achieve its policy aims in office, given the party's failure to deal with the problems of poverty and inequality in its two previous spells.4' In short, though Labour seems to have the more convincing policies, it has yet to convince about its ability to carry them out.
Turning to Labour's proposals for the NHS itself, there is a strong contrast between the political rhetoric and the specific proposals. The rhetoric is all about the elimination of "commercialisation" in the NHS, whereas the proposals themselves seem designed to salvage as much as possible from the reforms introduced by the Conservatives. So while trusts and fundholding are to be abolished, the crucial purchaserprovider split is to remain. Health authorities will concentrate (as now) on assessing needs, while service units (as now) will be responsible for the production of health care. The difference will be that the health authorities will set performance targets, embodied in service agreements, instead of issuing contracts. Since such service agreements will, presumably, be as concerned with specifying the expected outputs and standards as existing contracts, this rechristening may not make all that much difference. There will even be incentive payments to those who exceed their targets. Much more worrying is the document's lack of detail about what would happen to cross boundary flows. It rightly criticises the present system's failure to promote patient choice and, indeed, rather rashly commits itself to a patient's right to choose in which hospital to be treated but fails to explain how the new system would work: ifa district health authority has a service agreement with its local hospitals but all the patients choose to be treated in London what happens? We would seem to be back to the problems of the internal market, whose abolition would also remove the incentives to provider units to compete on efficiency.
In this, as in many other respects, Your Good Health is both reassuring and worrying. It is reassuring because the changes are not as dramatic as they seem at first sight; it is worrying precisely because of the assumption that it is possible to tinker with the machine while not changing its dynamics. So, for example, the document puts welcome emphasis on the importance of primary care. But it may be overoptimistic in its assumption that fundholding can be abolished while the advantages of this experiment are maintained. The success of the first wave may not tell us much about the applicability of fundholding as a general model.6 But the reaction to it by hospitals and health authorities, which have suddenly shown a sensitivity to the needs of general practitioners unprecedented in the history of the NHS, does suggest that purchasing power is highly persuasive. The document implicitly recognises this by proposing that, instead, health authorities would be obliged to secure the agreement of general practitioners when designing their service agreements.
In discussing how local priorities should be determined, Your Good Health wrestles with a problem that has foxed all governments-Conservative and Labour-since the creation of the NHS. This is how to combine national strategies with local flexibility. Thus the document makes much of the need for a national strategy, to be embodied in performance agreements with health authorities, while at the same time proposing to change the composition of health authorities to make them more accountable to local communities and requiring them to be more responsive to patient BMJ VOLUME 304 29 FEBRUARY 1992 Labour's health policy The conflict between the two main parties is now over means not ends wishes. There is not much evidence that including local councillors achieves such objectives.7 But leaving that aside, what is to happen if local and central priorities diverge or if the views of general practitioners and patients pull in different directions? In this respect the rhetoric of the document may encourage expectations that cannot be fulfilled.7 The main impression given by Your Good Health is of a document that addresses important issues seriously. It is overemphatic about the pathologies of the internal market, just as it is overreticent about the potential pathologies of its own more bureaucratic approach. It builds much more on the developments of the past decade than it is prepared to acknowledge, particularly in its emphasis on developing standards of quality and on patients rights. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, notably about the precise role of the proposed Quality Commission -which has an extraordinarily ambitious remit. Above all, it makes no specific financial commitment about the funding of the NHS. But in this respect it is surely being only realistic and honest. There is no point in making precise pledges if there can be no certainty about the ability to carry them out. Under any government the funding of the NHS depends on how the economy performs and on the administration's choice between competing priorities. If the past few months have shown anything it is surely the dangers of economic prediction. RUDOLF

Accreditation after Goldstein
Timefor higher training committees to reconsider their procedures The arguments in favour of accrediting the completion of higher specialist training have never been convincing. Accreditation was introduced by most, but not all, of the joint higher training committees at about the time that Britain implemented the European Community's medical directives, partly owing to the mistaken belief that these required member states to keep a specialist register.' Subsequently, proponents of accreditation have defended it as a means of promoting high standards of training and practice, though it has also been used as a more or less overt means of regulating the number of specialists.
The system has always been riddled with anomalies. Most of the medical royal colleges consider that accreditation indicates suitability for appointment to a consultant post, but all accept that candidates who are not accredited may also be suitable by virtue of their training and experience. Accreditation normally depends on the satisfactory completion of a specified period of training, at least part of which must take place in a substantive senior registrar post. Yet training acquired by locums or temporary appointees in the same posts is not considered to be acceptable.
These anomalies have been highlighted by the quashing in the High Court of a decision by the Joint Committee on Higher Medical Training to refuse accreditation in rheumatology to Dr A J Goldstein.2 Dr Goldstein had worked in a series of posts concerned with rheumatology between 1983 and 1990, including two years as a temporary senior registrar. He had never, however, been appointed to a substantive senior registrar post, and this was the joint committee's stated reason for refusing accreditation. After judicial review Mr Justice Rose directed that the joint committee should reconsider its decision.
The case has raised several issues that now require urgent attention. The first of these is the requirement that candidates for accreditation should hold, or have held, substantive senior registrar posts. This requirement was not contained in the joint committee's handbook in 1984, when Dr Goldstein began his training in rheumatology, though it was included by 1989, when he applied for enrolment. The requirement is not absolute in that the committee will consider applications from trainees in other types of post if they are of comparable status.
The term substantive senior registrar post is not defined but is normally taken to mean an appointment made by a legally constituted advisory appointments committee after an advertisement. Dr Goldstein argued that his posts were substantive, in the ordinary meaning of the word.
Although the training received by doctors appointed as temporary senior registrars probably does not differ significantly from that of substantive holders of the same posts, the ability and achievement of the post holders may vary considerably. The way in which substantive senior registrars are selected, in open competition, guarantees the quality of those appointed. No such guarantees exist for temporary senior registrar appointments, for which there is no standard selection procedure and which may be made informally. The general requirement for a substantive appointment is therefore justified provided it is not applied over rigidly.
In fact, the joint committee's decision was based not only on the question of substantive senior registrar appointment but also on the results of "soundings" that the committee had taken among the consultants with whom Dr Goldstein had worked. His counsel argued that this was contrary to natural justice, in that he had neither known of the soundings nor been given an opportunity to deal with matters raised against him. The handbook of the Joint Committee on Higher Medical Training does not refer to the possibility of such reports being sought, though that of the surgical training committee does. The term "satisfactory completion of training" implies not only serving in an approved post for a prescribed time but also acquiring during that time the skills and attributes needed by an independently practising specialist. Reports from trainers provide important evidence that the necessary standard has been attained.
It is not the reports themselves that raise a problem but their confidential nature. Critical scrutiny and constructive feedback are essential elements of training,3 and trainers' reports should not contain criticisms of which their trainees are unaware. That they often do is cause for concern. The training committees should strike a blow for openness and greater honesty by requiring all trainers to provide their trainees with copies of reports about them.
The third issue of concern is the apparent confusion that