By Dave Putson
If ever there was a politician who always tries to show how relevant they are, Tony Blair is the one, always in the forefront of one type of promotion or another. This time, the Politico website reports that the former Prime Minister (or at least his minions) have produced a report talking of a radical overhaul of the NHS.
In the report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, here is how they define their assessment of the current primary health care model:
“The traditional model of 10 minutes with a doctor to discuss one problem by the time you’re already sick persists in some places, but increasingly practices are adopting a [population health management] approach”
‘Population health management’ relying on AI
So they are advocating the use of artificial intelligence as the answer to all our dreams for decent healthcare.
But ‘population health management’? A single doctor seeing all 70 million of us?; a programme incorporating artificial intelligence as some supposed answer to all our health expectations?
I have watched the Al Jazeera feature called “Inside Story” on artificial intelligence, with analysis by a journalist AI expert, a former World Economic Forum director and a Manchester based US psychologist. Not surprisingly, they were partially concerned about its activation into our lives, quite possibly their biggest concerns being on the massive increased energy usage it will inevitably cause, with the building of huge data centres to be able to process all of the information. Nonetheless their view was that its inclusion is already with us and will seemingly exponentially increase and consequently bring us some negatives but generally massive gains to our lives and well being.
AI systems are not a panacea
Well excuse me for not being so gushing and somewhat cynical. But to offer us supposedly artificial intelligence systems with our sadly lacking politicians offering the policies upon which these systems can be built and it becomes seemingly clearer that this “silver bullet” is not quite the panacea that the politicians think it is. And then I can draw your attention to a much more measured article on Novara Media by James Meadway. See the link here.
This analysis should bring all AI enthusiasts back down to earth with a rather heavy bump. It talks about the massive energy usage required and also the water usage involved and gets you to think about the granular detail on artificial intelligence rather than the politicians broad stroke fantasies. It’s applications may well offer some benefits but at what cost to a wider populations needs, for water, for energy, and for their environment not to suddenly become much hotter with this contribution from these energy guzzling data centres?
Blair, whose government was responsible for assisting in the NHS decline and continual drift to a USA based privatised system, is not surprisingly now seeing another opportunity to justify this degeneration of a once much vaunted and much loved institution, towards further privatisation which would undoubtedly see UK citizens having to cope with a two tier health service offering. Those at the poorer and poverty end of this scale would be receiving a UK version of Medicare/ Medicaid, where access to a doctor would be severely constrained based upon costs. However, if you would be a member of society that could also make additional financial contributions to your health care then you would have access to a General Practitioner, much more readily.
Local campaigns to ‘reclaim the NHS’
Part of the first steps towards this are already underway. A group of local London campaigners “Reclaim the NHS” have a leaflet exposing some of the issues already being experienced by patients in the NHS system and their next leaflet to raise the public awareness talks to Medical Associate Practitioners. In their words:
The NHS is desperately in need of fully qualified doctors, including GPs and specialists. Instead of spending to train these, the Government intends to fill the gap with ‘Physician Associates (PA)’.
And they state further:
PAs lack the training and knowledge of Doctors. A PA only has two years of medical training following an undergraduate degree, which might not even be in a science specialty. All Doctors must pass a highly competitive five-year medical degree before further training and experience on wards and GP practices.
And this offers an insight into how matters are rapidly moving to a privatising endgame and part of the distraction strategy is to have your average politicians, Tony Blair, Wes Streeting, doing the bidding of these huge financial private health corporations, and talking up artificial intelligence as though it is the answer to all our health needs.
Millions on offer for the private sector in the NHS
Tony Blair talks of digitising all of our health records as just one aspect of of this supposed AI revolution. However, that is already underway and Palantir has a government contract worth £300 million to effect this. Lets not worry about two aspects of this for starters: Palantir is an acknowledged partner of the American CIA, and we can see what good they do about the entire globe; but further why would we want our private most intimate health details in the hands and on the databanks of foreign sovereign states?
Wes Streeting the new governments Health Secretary talks up bringing the private health sector into the NHS to assist the failing NHS. But the NHS is failing because of the introduction of privatised health and a public relations strategy to denigrate the NHS. Private health companies will divide their funding stream from the NHS into, simplistically, one third profit, one third dividends to their shareholders and one third patient care. If 100% of that money was dedicated to patient care we may be able to afford to pay nurses what they are worth, to pay resident doctors what they are worth, whilst still receiving the superb NHS treatment that we have all to come to expect.
In the new management-speak introduced by the Tory privatisation legislation, Wes Streeting, even though Health Secretary, is theoretically no longer directly accountable or responsible for patient care or NHS provision. So he can talk about what needs to be done, but increasingly more responsibility is passing to the private health companies now embedded in our NHS. Yet, ultimately, Streeting has the political and financial powers – if he chose to use them – to dictate how the NHS functions.
So will these companies graduate to AI to improve provision? I do not think so. USA companies have cut back investment in AI in recent years as the benefits have not materialised as advocates such as Tony Blair have expressed, and where they continue with their investment in AI they do not find new money (and cost and interest payments for this research and development) for this they use the age old excuse, cost efficiencies, or job cuts to you and me.
Fight against privatisation in the NHS
Artificial intelligence will see its way into our health services more and more and we will only hear about the upsides, but the patients will neither see this reflected in improved health provision, or hugely improved administrative practices. But this will be utilised as another financial bonanza for the privatised and privatising health companies and another means to get further access to the £200 billion annual business that they see as our NHS.
[picture top from Wikimedia Commons, here]
