Alcohol Abuse Advice

Should UK be sacking its NHS Advisors?

The decision by the Department of Health to slash down the number of NHS care advisors has expectedly stirred up a lot of opposition from the effected parties and the general public who view this as an abrupt stop to a value added service which was doing a great job by creating awareness on health and prevention.

The government claims that the money that would be freed as a result of the slash would not be diverted elsewhere but deployed in the Department of Health’s core area of direct treatment of diseases. The axing would leave 1,700 doctors, nurses and health professionals jobless and the government is working on a redundancy package for them.

NHS workers are primarily engaged in combating disease, improving patient care, fighting alcoholism, obesity and creating awareness on the need to lead active lives. The move will mainly hit program funded workers as the government is planning to abolish programme funding in a phased manner. While the move claims to make more funds available for actual treatment, senior doctors say that it would be counter productive as NHS workers are doing a great job of enhancing health awareness and prevention that act as an effective mechanism in keeping people healthy and reducing the numbers that need direct treatment. They reason that it would cost the government much lesser to keep people healthy and out of hospitals than what it would cost to treat them. Besides prevention also means alleviating people from suffering and pain and financial loss on account of man hours lost.

It is true that the NHS workers are as a vital link in the government’s health care efforts, they bring their expertise in the area of prevention and critical awareness on obesity and alcoholism which are very real health issues today. The simple point is that the government does not have the luxury of an option, cuts in expenditure in the MoH have to be effected and it is only a question of where they would pain lesser. While a cut in any area of health care would have a negative impact overall, it is apparent that in comparison direct patient care is a far more critical area and cannot be touched. This has left the government with the only choice of cutting down the expense on NHS.

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