Conclusion

Health services must serve the people — there can be little justification for them if they cannot. Proposals for reform, for rebuilding the Health services in this country, are beneficial insofar as they improve the services people get — and that is the only criteria they can be judged upon. Bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake when Peoples' lives are at stake is crass and callous stupidity. Yet that is what the White Paper comes close to at times. There is a commendable set of principles outlined: that people should have health services by right, not by money; and that the private sector should not be able to divert resources from the public sector to serve a wealthy elite, leaving the poor with a deprived service. There is a welcome desire to restructure services to ensure they are less chaotic than at present, and an attempt to integrate all aspects of health care — educative, preventive and curative. All this is good.

However, there is a disturbing stress in the White Paper on organisation, on the methods of structuring things and not enough on how the men and women in the medical service can improve their own conditions and the standard of community service. Much of the White Paper is good, but insofar as it continues the present pattern of ordinary people having little control over their health service provided by upper-middle class doctors and public servants, there is still a long way to go.