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BMA meeting: BMA passes vote of no confidence in health secretary

BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f4106 (Published 25 June 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f4106
  1. Nigel Hawkes
  1. 1Edinburgh

The BMA has passed a vote of no confidence in England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. At its annual representative meeting on Monday 24 June a motion linking Hunt’s “attack on the NHS and his comments about mediocrity and coasting” with a call to express no confidence in him was passed overwhelmingly, with only a handful of dissenters.

Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist at the Whittington Hospital in London and a member of the BMA council, said that Hunt had provoked a huge wave of anger among doctors.

“His main interest seems to be blaming staff for the predictable chaos resulting from his government’s policies,” she said. “How much longer are we going to put up with the government treating the NHS as a car boot sale? There are so many reasons to have no confidence in this secretary of state I can’t list them all—we’d be here all morning.”

Despite a suggestion from Andrew Mowat, an East Midland GP, who said that he was no apologist for the government but that doctors would do their patients no service by voting for the motion, it was passed on a wave of antigovernment sentiment that also saw a series of critical motions on other issues sail through. Health secretaries have been denied the confidence of the BMA before, but Hunt has been in office only since September last year.

In March this year he warned that “weeds of failure grow more quickly in a garden of mediocrity” and that too many hospitals were “coasting” rather than striving. Such remarks, together with his suggestion that the crisis in hospital emergency departments was caused by GPs not offering an adequate service out of hours—a claim rejected yesterday as “shameful” by the chairman of the BMA council, Mark Porter—have quickly earned him the ire of doctors.

Among the other motions passed was a call to repeal the Health and Social Care Act—“bad for patients, bad for the NHS, and bad for the public,” the meeting asserted—and more specifically to withdraw section 75 of the act, which covers the competition obligations of commissioners. Chaand Nagpaul, a north London GP, who moved the motion, said that section 75 was unequivocal in making it clear that competitive tendering was obligatory and was an “open invitation” for private industry to bid for services.

Resisting Porter, who argued that the BMA was already campaigning against section 75 and that further action should be left to the discretion of its council, the representatives passed the motion by an overwhelming majority.

Those who argued against calling for the repeal of the whole act, including John Canning of the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee, were similarly rebuffed, but much more narrowly. Canning argued that the structural reorganisation that had resulted from the act had cost £1.6bn (€1.9bn; $2.5bn). “What would it cost to undo it? Turning the clock back won’t work,” he said.

But Louise Irvine, a GP from southeast London and a member of council, said that the act would be repealed without any “redisorganisation” by removing only the competition elements of the act. Representatives agreed, but only by a slim majority on an electronic vote, with 46.6% in favour and 43.4% against, and 10% abstaining.

George Rae, a GP from Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, warned that even the positive effects of the act were being smothered. The aim had been to empower GPs, but it was not turning out that way, he argued in proposing a motion on clinical commissioning groups. CCGs were not getting the promised autonomy, he said, with too much interference and control from NHS England. He called for the BMA to consider balloting GPs on withdrawing their engagement from the groups.

Porter reminded the meeting that all GPs were obliged by law to belong to a CCG, so withdrawing would be illegal. But Rae said that the motion did not call for unlawful action; it simply suggested that the BMA should “consider balloting GPs on withdrawal,” and on that basis the motion passed in its entirety.

Notes

Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f4106

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