Allyson Pollock | |
---|---|
Education | University of Dundee |
Medical career | |
Profession | Doctor |
Field | Public health |
Website | www |
Allyson Pollock is a consultant in public health medicine and was the Director of the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University. She is an academic who is known for her research into, and opposition to, part privatisation of the UK National Health Service (NHS) via the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and other mechanisms.
Pollock gained a BSc in physiology at the University of Dundee in Scotland then became a medical graduate (MB ChB) of the same university. [1] She later completed an MSc at the London School of Hygiene. [1] She became a consultant in public health medicine in 1991. [2]
Pollock was head of the Public Health Policy Unit at University College London and director of research and development at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. [1]
Pollock set up and directed the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh from 2005 to 2011.
She was professor of public health research and policy at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London
In 2014, she was elected to the Council of the British Medical Association, for a four-year term. [3]
In January 2017, she became the Director of the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University. [4]
Allyson Pollock has provided evidence to the British Parliament [5] and the Welsh National Assembly [6] regarding PFI. Under her directorship CIPHP provided evidence [7] to the Scottish Parliament regarding PFI.
In their statements of evidence, Allyson Pollock and her co-researcher Mark Hellowell argue that capital investment through PFI creates a large public sector cash liability. For example, they say that the £5.2 billion of PFI investment in Scotland has created a public sector cash liability of £22.3bn. [7] This cash liability is 'off balance-sheet' and does not show up on government statistics such as the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR).
Pollock and Hellowell also say that, although the UK government's support for PFI is based on its supposed ability to deliver good value for money, the mechanisms for testing this are skewed. [7] While developing PFI proposals, contracting authorities such as NHS trusts are required to construct a theoretical alternative to the use of PFI, which compares the value for money offered by a public versus a private finance scheme. The publicly funded alternative is called a 'public sector comparator'. In theory, if this exercise concludes that PFI does not represent good value for money compared to public finance, then the latter should be used for the procurement. However, in practice this rarely happens.
The reasons for this are discussed in a paper [8] co-written by Pollock and published in the BMJ. Pollock et al. conclude that the true risks of many privately financed contracts are not calculated correctly. They argue that the system involves a high degree of subjectivity regarding the value of the risk being transferred to the private sector. They take one example of an NHS project in which one of the risks theoretically being transferred was that the target for clinical cost savings would not be met. The cost of this risk was estimated at £5m. However, in practice the private consortium had no responsibility for ensuring that there would actually be clinical cost-savings, and faced no penalty if there were none. The paper concludes therefore that the risk transfer was "spurious".
Jeremy Colman, former deputy general of the National Audit Office and the current Auditor General for Wales has supported Pollock's findings. In a Financial Times article [9] he is quoted as saying many PFI appraisals suffer from "spurious precision" and others are based on "pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo". Some, he says, are simply "utter rubbish". He noted the pressures on contracting authorities to weight their appraisal in favour of taking their projects down the PFI route: "If the answer comes out wrong you don't get your project. So the answer doesn't come out wrong very often."
Pollock's son played rugby and suffered serious injury on three occasions before the age of 16: a broken nose, a fractured leg and a fractured cheekbone with concussion. [10] Following this she has spent more than a decade researching the risks involved. In 2014 she said "rugby union in schools must distinguish itself from the very brutal game practiced by the professionals." [11] She criticised poor monitoring of injuries sustained during games played by school children. She cited research from Ireland which found that in children of secondary school age the rate of injury in rugby was three times higher than other sports. In the course of a season, children have a 20% chance of concussion or bone fracture and one in seven parents have considered withdrawing their child from the games. [11]
In March 2016, Pollock was one of more than 70 doctors and academics who were signatories to an open letter seeking a ban on tackling in school level rugby matches. [12] This group set out details of the risks involved in the letter addressed to ministers, chief medical officers and children's commissioners in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. World Rugby, the sport's governing body, responded by releasing the results of a survey that stated 92% of parents of children aged between seven and 18-years-old believed that the benefits of children playing sport outweighs the risks. [13]
Health care reform is for the most part governmental policy that affects health care delivery in a given place. Health care reform typically attempts to:
The private finance initiative (PFI) was a United Kingdom government procurement policy aimed at creating "public–private partnerships" (PPPs) where private firms are contracted to complete and manage public projects. Initially launched in 1992 by Prime Minister John Major, and expanded considerably by the Blair government, PFI is part of the wider programme of privatisation and financialisation, and presented as a means for increasing accountability and efficiency for public spending.
A public–private partnership is a long-term arrangement between a government and private sector institutions. Typically, it involves private capital financing government projects and services up-front, and then drawing revenues from taxpayers and/or users for profit over the course of the PPP contract. Public–private partnerships have been implemented in multiple countries and are primarily used for infrastructure projects. Although they are not necessary, PPPs have been employed for building, equipping, operating and maintaining schools, hospitals, transport systems, and water and sewerage systems.
An NHS foundation trust is a semi-autonomous organisational unit within the National Health Service in England. They have a degree of independence from the Department of Health and Social Care. As of March 2019 there were 151 foundation trusts.
The Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) is a large National Health Service academic teaching hospital in the Norwich Research Park on the western outskirts of Norwich, England.
Primary care trusts (PCTs) were part of the National Health Service in England from 2001 to 2013. PCTs were largely administrative bodies, responsible for commissioning primary, community and secondary health services from providers. Until 31 May 2011, they also provided community health services directly. Collectively PCTs were responsible for spending around 80 per cent of the total NHS budget. Primary care trusts were abolished on 31 March 2013 as part of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, with their work taken over by clinical commissioning groups.
The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (RIE), often known as the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (ERI), was established in 1729 and is the oldest voluntary hospital in Scotland. The new buildings of 1879 were claimed to be the largest voluntary hospital in the United Kingdom, and later on, the Empire. The hospital moved to a new 900 bed site in 2003 in Little France. It is the site of clinical medicine teaching as well as a teaching hospital for the University of Edinburgh Medical School. In 1960, the first successful kidney transplant performed in the UK was at this hospital. In 1964, the world's first coronary care unit was established at the hospital. It is the only site for liver, pancreas and pancreatic islet cell transplantation and one of two sites for kidney transplantation in Scotland. In 2012, the Emergency Department had 113,000 patient attendances, the highest number in Scotland. It is managed by NHS Lothian.
NHS Scotland, sometimes styled NHSScotland, is the publicly funded healthcare system in Scotland and one of the four systems that make up the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. It operates 14 territorial NHS boards across Scotland, supported by seven special non-geographic health boards, and Public Health Scotland.
Healthcare in the United Kingdom is a devolved matter, with England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales each having their own systems of publicly funded healthcare, funded by and accountable to separate governments and parliaments, together with smaller private sector and voluntary provision. As a result of each country having different policies and priorities, a variety of differences have developed between these systems since devolution.
Criticism of the National Health Service (England) includes issues such as access, waiting lists, healthcare coverage, and various scandals. The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded health care system of England, created under the National Health Service Act 1946 by the post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee. It has come under much criticism, especially during the early 2000s, due to outbreaks of antibiotic resistant infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile infection, waiting lists, and medical scandals such as the Alder Hey organs scandal. However, the involvement of the NHS in scandals extends back many years, including over the provision of mental health care in the 1970s and 1980s (ultimately part of the reason for the Mental Health Act 1983), and overspends on hospital newbuilds, including Guy's Hospital Phase III in London in 1985, the cost of which shot up from £29 million to £152 million.
The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system in England, and one of the four National Health Service systems in the United Kingdom. It is the second largest single-payer healthcare system in the world after the Brazilian Sistema Único de Saúde. Primarily funded by the government from general taxation, and overseen by the Department of Health and Social Care, the NHS provides healthcare to all legal English residents and residents from other regions of the UK, with most services free at the point of use for most people. The NHS also conducts research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
Dame Barbara Mary Stocking, is a British public servant, former chief executive of Oxfam GB, and former president of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.
Partnerships UK plc (PUK) was an centralized unit responsible for furthering public-private partnerships in the United Kingdom. It was a public limited company formed in 2000, owned jointly by HM Treasury and the private sector. It ceased activity in 2011.
The National Health Action Party (NHA) is a political party in the United Kingdom.
The Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) is a London think tank founded in 2012 to defend "the founding principles of the NHS". It is a registered charity.
Devi Lalita Sridhar FRSE is an American public health researcher, who is both professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research considers the effectiveness of public health interventions and how to improve developmental assistance for health. Sridhar directs the University of Edinburgh's Global Health Governance Programme which she established in 2014.
Under the Knife is a 2019 feature-length documentary film directed by Susan Steinberg, produced by Pamela Kleinot and narrated by actor Alison Steadman. Supported by Britain's Labour Party, health trade unions, and the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, it argues that England's state-run National Health Service (NHS) is being intentionally privatised and underfunded. Though its premise and conclusions have been disputed, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock has stated in Parliament that he considers to be outdated arguments about a split between public and private in healthcare. NHS funding going to private firms escalated during the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic.
Margaret Mary McCartney is a general practitioner, freelance writer and broadcaster based in Glasgow, Scotland. McCartney is a vocal advocate for evidence-based medicine. McCartney was a regular columnist at the British Medical Journal. She regularly writes articles for The Guardian and currently contributes to the BBC Radio 4 programme, Inside Health. She has written three popular science books, The Patient Paradox, The State of Medicine and Living with Dying. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McCartney contributed content to academic journals and broadcasting platforms, personal blog, and social media to inform the public and dispel myths about coronavirus disease.
Operation Moonshot was a UK government programme to introduce same-day mass testing for COVID-19 in England as a way of enabling large gatherings of people to take place in that country while maintaining control over the virus. According to the British Medical Journal, the programme aimed to deliver 10 million tests per day by 2021.
Hamish Meldrum is a British doctor who worked as a general practitioner and was Chair of the Council of the British Medical Association (BMA) 2007–2012. He took this role on after being Chair of the BMA's General Practitioners Committee (GPC) 2004–2007.