Nice and Healthcare Rationing in The Uk
by As an organisation NICE was established in order to improve the cost effectiveness of the National Health Service (NHS) besides helping to reduce the waiting lists and times for medical treatment, and also allowing all patients to receive the treatment most appropriate for their actual health needs.
When the newly established NHS became the predominant national provider of publicly financed medical services and treatments for everybody living in the United Kingdom in 1946 the Atlee government stressed that there would be no need to ration health care provision at all.1 From 1946 the brand new NHS was run by civil servants in consultation with medical professions. The civil servants however regulated the NHS organisation according to the ways the British government required them to do so, and they also decided upon, which drugs, medications, and treatments were actually used, or not used by the NHS in its provision of medical treatment.2 Having civil servants make the main decisions about the regulation and rationing of the NHS was regarded, as keeping the organisation effectively administered yet not particularly well – received by health care professionals.3
The decisions concerning the level of medical services and treatments were taken by civil servants consulting medical experts as and when required whilst following the guidelines set by the central government in Whitehall.4 Even at the earliest stages of its existence the NHS and its decision – makers had to find a difficult balance between treating all of the patients that required medical attention whilst not using up excessive amounts of funding or medicines to do so. People at this point regarded the NHS as being much better than all previous levels or quality of publicly funded health care provision in the United Kingdom, despite its shortcomings in terms of treatment not keeping up to demand.5 Indeed from the very onset of the NHS the national levels of demand for its medical services and treatments exceeded by far the expectations or predictions of successive British governments.6
NICE has certainly found that public demand for the state financed NHS in many respects justifies its efforts to regulate and ration the services or treatments provided by the NHS. All of the medical services and treatments provided via the NHS were supposed to be free at the point of delivery yet prescription charges had to be introduced to cover the cost of drugs whilst rationing was a widely yet covertly carried out practice.7 The contemporary NHS with assistance from NICE still delivers the bulk of its services and also its medical treatments free at the point of delivery.8
Liked it
