A Hidden Medical Disaster.

The Tories are now doing to Medical GPs what they did to Dental GPs in England in the 1990's - create a funding crisis causing GP's to walk from their current NHS contracts then buy in private companies to run the NHS GP service using cheap professional imports from Eastern Europe while blaming the current NHS GP's and using their tame media to paint them as greedy, traitors, letting their patients down and all other sorts of emotional blackmail to hide their own crimes.

The long term impact of this strategy can be seen in the General Dental Council's growing failure, as a regulator, in the face of ever increasing complaints which the Dental Defence Unions will tell you are mainly against overseas graduates working in NHS, private company run, sweat shops.

The UK dentists are now in dispute with the GDC over an intended 400% rise in their registration fee in January 2015 to cover this increase in disciplinary cases and other internal financial failures in the GDC which are due to Government policy in England. Private, Welsh and Scottish dental practitioners do not see why they should be paying for NHS England's dental policy failure. Part time dentists (mainly women) feel they are being discriminated against by the massive fee hike, now even the BDA has been forced to stir its collective arse and is seeking an urgent 'judicial review' of the GDC's conduct on this and other matters. A number of NHS GDP's in England have already decided to close their practices and emigrate to NZ or Canada or Oz - just like their NHS England GP colleagues.

The best way for ordinary folk to stop this travesty from happening is to start bombarding your MPs with your concerns, bury them in paper work because in six month's time they will be snuffling around for your vote.

If the English Greens have a modicum of political sense they will now campaign widely on the issue of ever reducing access across England to GPs and DGPs within the NHS in England.

In the meantime there is growing talk of UK Dentists refusing to pay the new fee or just paying last year's fee (on the grounds of the BDA's judicial review) and then shutting their surgeries if NHS or carrying on working 'illegally' forcing the GDC to take them to criminal court. The betting is the GDC will not want to go down the criminal court route as it may eventually expose them to the ECHR on the basis of blocking the right to fair, reasonable and equable trading conditions plus unfair discrimination against part time workers.

So how does this effect NHS Scotland?

It is clear this scam of forcing GP's out of practice in England is an attempt to ensure GP funding in England can remain capped with the 'private company run' GP practice solution importing cheap labour from Eastern Europe to keeping 'costs' down. This has an impact on the funding available under the current Barnet formula for GP services in Scotland. The Scottish Government has already injected more cash into the GP Practice pot in Scotland to alleviate this real term drop in funding for 2014-15 which saw GP's in England getting a 0.82% uplift in total funding for GP services in England against inflationary pressures within UK medicine running at over 3%.

The SNP is committed to robbing Peter to pay the NHS Paul but this clearly means other Scottish Government funding areas take a hit and they still do not have enough funds they can 'free up' to meet the real inflationary costs in NHS Scotland.

On the dental side you could see within NHS Scotland's dental service an increasing loss of availability as part timers take themselves off the Dental Register, due to the fee hike, compounding an already critical manpower problem in NHS Scotland dental services.

If ever there is a clear example of just how badly decisions made in the UK Parliament on English issues can screw Scotland over - this is it.