A documentary film on NHS sell off by Peter Bach. Corporate interests rather than patient care is driving reform in today’s NHS and will divert money away from YOU. And the media are failing to tell you this.
Peter Bach’s Comment: This film is radical. With over a dozen NHS insiders as my witnesses, I will tell the alarming story of how the health service as we know it is being quietly abolished. Almost without our noticing, it’s been replaced by a system modelled on the US in which care is delivered by profit-maximising companies that charge patients for treatment which is anyway to be restricted and reduced. One medical reporter the filmmaker knows claims that health reporting today is so poor because few journalists have real sources inside the NHS. Well, this film will have a riot of medical sources – including one professor, two consultant radiologists, a cancer expert, a public interest lawyer, and several outspoken GPs. What they all have to say will be shocking, unusual and brave. Our doctors will really strike back in this one.
I will shine a torch on what some doctors see as a glaring omission in the national psyche. I have identified a powerful group of figures within the NHS who are alarmed by the public’s lack of awareness about the abolition of their NHS. This film will follow their arguments right the way up to the Health Secretary’s relinquishing of responsibility for the nation’s health, and will argue that it must be reversed.
This film also takes you on a personal journey to a national theme that has massive implications for us all. It will reveal a hidden agenda that’s already having disastrous effects. According to one senior consultant: ‘It’s like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank’. Each of the insiders will speak to us intimately, as if we’re patients in the consulting room. It will be clear that these doctors are people simply doing their jobs by putting their patients’ interests – which are also the viewers’ interests – first. What perhaps will surprise us most is how efficiency and quality will drop. Or, perilously, how close we are to falling forever down a pitiless US-style empty well of no-bucks-no-care. Though the diagnosis remains bleak, the strength of the characters at the film’s disposal should give us surprising hope, casting flashes of light across an otherwise bleak landscape.
The style of the film is intimate, hand-held scrupulousness. Interviews will take place in discreet corners of hospitals, surgeries and streets, the images at times elevated by a powerful soundtrack, leaving the viewer with an overall admiration for the doctors’ speaking out, combined with anger at what’s happening.