Why?

I was just about to go to bed, when I thought I would check the last few emails that had come in. I wish I hadn’t. They told me that Dr. Felicity Harvey CBE, currently Director of the Implementation Unit in the Cabinet Office, would take up the post of Director General for Public Health. She will lead the Department’s public health teams and will work closely with Public Health England, the NHS Commissioning Board and local government.

Now I know nothing about Dr. Felicity Harvey. I am sure that she is a splendid and highly ethical person. However, looking her up on Google, all I could come up with is that she is the director of medicines, pharmacy and industry group at the Department of Health. Forgive me, but to a PH person, this does not look like PH. In fact, quite the opposite. Surely somebody who is leading such an important PH task ought to know something about the subject?

Call me paranoid, but I begin to see a pattern here:

·      The Chief Medical Officer is no longer the head of the medical service, but only of the PH service [you missed that? So did lots of people, but it’s true], yet she has no PH training at all. She is, in fact, a haematologist, an academic, and head of research. How does that qualify her to head up PH? Why was that not a PH job?

·      The post of Director General for Public Health is similarly not defined as a PH job – in fact, it seems to have been given to somebody with more links to the pharmaceutical industry than to PH.

·      The PH input to commissioning NHS services is being totally ignored and down-graded (happy to supply details).

So I ask: WHY:

·      Is the Government determined to side-line PH?

·      Has the Government decided to ignore all PH trained people?

·      Will the Government not listen to a highly trained cadre of people prepared to do their best to make the system work?

Could it possibly be that we have been too honest, too open? That we have been prepared to be constructively critical?

‘Of course not’ I hear you cry.

Just as we were not excluded, together with most of out medical colleagues, from the summit at Downing Street because ‘we would not be constructive’.

This is not democracy. It is a shameful sham.

Those of us who have voted for the Conservative and LibDem parties in the past will not forget. We will not forget that the NHS has been sold to the highest bidder, with no regard to the people of this country.

SHAME ON YOU MR CAMERON AND MR CLEGG

I DO NOT KNOW HOW YOU CAN FACE YOURSELVES