Tales from the Darkside - the start.

Those of our regular readership (thank you and a happy New Year) will know that in the Northernshire province of Shiteton Soviet we are so well served by our local Harvard and Yale educated commissars with years of private sector involvement in highflying companies that GPs are completely unnecessary in providing local healthcare.

The current Tripartite coalition on NHS healthcare privatization has been so warmly received that here in Shiteton PCT, Northernshire GPs have been throwing themselves anywhere else than to be involved with clinical commissioning for there are so many GPs here that we daily have to draw lots to see who is unfortunate enough to be sent to the golf course rather than provide patient care. Not all parts of the UK are that lucky.

The plethora of Harvard and Yale MBAs we have at our local Soviet means that our patients enjoy first world care the whole time from their cradle to their grave given their extended life expectancy due to the excellent local NHS commissars.

The Party however via its local organs are concerned about the lack of golf playing GPs involved in local NHS commissioning and clearly have a quota to meet and as GP after GP declines to be involved due to the Party's excellent local Soviet they have been looking for "volunteers" to start as GP commissioners in the New Year. As a result one of the team here at ND Central has, under duress, been seconded to the darkside.

The volunteer was selected at the infamous café Michelle using the time honoured tradition of playing Russian roulette albeit with a blank round in the revolver. Those familiar with the scenes from the Deer Hunter will know what the particpants felt as someone from the team would have to, gulp, do commissioning if they "won" at roulette after a heavy evening of Resistance work.

Given that the Parties all feel that "clinical" commissioning is fully supported by the(ir) medical profession (gong hunter friends at the Royal Colleges) you would have thought there would be no problem locally with "volunteers".

So at last one of the Resistence has been turned to the darkside not through NHS "Choice®™" but through the need for survival and we hope to provide some insights from a dark merky world that needs to be brought to light.

This may lead to a few articles about how NHS commissioning both past and present have been delivered for the benefit of the comrade patient. It will also show how the force of the dark Lord Vadar of the NCB operates to ensure true Soviet style "local" (GP led?) healthcare commissioning via Central Party diktat and control.

Remember comrade GPs the command centre is no longer in Moscow, or Whitehall, or in the dark world of the NCB formerly known as the Department of Health, but "The headquarters will be in the consulting room and the clinic."

Praise be to the Party for ensuring that each NHS reform will lead to nothing useful in healthcare bar an increase in costs and administration coupled with decreased quality and quantity of healthcare. Both of which benefit not the private sector or administrators but the patient and their healthcare . . . you have been warned.