Guess who's coming to dinner, Nicola

In another recent blog [Hewers of the stone of hope] I suggested Scotland’s First Minister had given up on winning the struggle for equalities.  The evidence keeps piling up.

In November this year, at a gig in Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange, and where a table for 10 bums will set you back £1,000+VAT, the Scottish Health Awards are intending to:

“recognise and reward Scotland's most dedicated and caring NHS workers”

There are fourteen categories of what the organisers patronisingly describe as “healing heroes”.  In previous years, one of the categories was for ‘Equality in Healthcare’.

Guess what.  No equality category this year.  Dropped.  Surplus.  Needed no more.  Redundant.

So.  Not only has the First Minister given up winning the struggle, the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Health & Wellbeing, Nicola Sturgeon, is now running an NHS which doesn’t seem to think that people working on delivering the unwinnable - according to her boss- goal of equalities in the NHS are worth recognition any more.  Just in case you can’t remember who does what in government, Nicola also carries the government bag for equalities work in Scotland.

Nicola also carries the government
bag for equalities work in Scotland

While government gives up on the struggle to eliminate discrimination and deliver equality, while the NHS in Scotland is quietly cutting the numbers of staff and nurses employed, while the number of cancelled operations is at a record high of over 16,700, later this year some of our health boards will apparently manage to find over £1,000 to buy tables at an event of dubious merit to securing measurable improvements in patient care for, say, the BME community in Scotland.

Digging around the margins of this event starts to leave me wondering just where the NHS is headed under Nicola’s leadership [the government are ‘associates’ of the event, alongside such as the Daily Record].

Sponsors include GlaxoSmithKline.  A UK company, GlaxoSmithKline is facing problems in the US over the diabetes drug Avandia.  The New York Times carried a story in January of this year on how GlaxoSmithKline had announced “it was setting aside $3.4 billion — wiping out fourth-quarter profit — to pay for United States government investigations and product liability cases”.  The article explains :

"Avandia has been controversial since a 2007 analysis linked it with a 43 percent increase in the risk of heart attacks."

Another sponsor is Boehringer Ingelheim, a privately owned German drug company.  In 2006 HIV/AIDS activist Mark Harrington delivered a talk at a 2 day symposium organised by Boehringer Ingelheim on ‘HIV past and future’.

Mark Harrington
Executive Director
of TAG

In his address he set out in detail why he believed :

"BI has failed to clearly define a dose which is both safe and effective for use in diverse HIV infected individuals"

The symposium took place at the Sheraton Golf Parco de'Medici, on 6 April 2006, Rome.  The postscript from Mark’s published notes on his address - AIDS Activism, Boehringer Ingelheim and the Broken Social Contract - is worth a read :

"After my talk, BI corporate spokeswoman Judith von Gordon-Weichelt approached me to clarify that BI's 2005 global sales, not profits, were $10 billion.  She stated that as she was in public relations we were engaged in the same kind of work.  I told her that I was an activist working for social change while she was a well-paid employee of a wealthy private German drug company whose job was to ensure that bad publicity was deflected rather than to frankly address critical issues that needed to be resolved.  She stated that it was not accurate that Aptivus would soon be eclipsed by other newer ARVs and I asked if she could provide me with sales figures on tipranavir.  She demurred. Another person told me that as patients did not pay directly for drugs in Europe the price did not matter here.  I went back to my hotel room to revise and expand my remarks.  Later that night, the Italian physicians were taken by bus to an opulent mansion overlooking Rome for champagne and a three-course dinner.  I sat with some Italian activists and we discussed the shoddy methodology and confusing results of the RESIST studies.  Stacks of Alan Bennett's La Ceremonia del Massaggio (The Laying on of Hands) were piled up at the exits so that everyone could have a free (albeit literary) massage after dinner. The sated diners returned to their golfcourse hotel and resort after dinner.  To top it all off, upon return to the hotel room, participants were welcomed by a small gift-wrapped box with a small silver bowl, "set made of silver '800 with hand-engraved border."³¹

In the early 1990s, the political system which had dominated Italy since World War II collapsed in a wave of corruption scandals known as "Tangentopoli." According to Wikipedia, Tangentopoli (Italian for bribeville) was the name used to indicate the corruption-based system that dominated Italy until the Mani pulite [clean hands] investigation delivered it a deadly blow in 1992. Whether things have really changed since then, or whether only the names of those involved have, is a matter of debate.^32"

Another ‘associate’ of the event along with Scottish Government is Pfizer, another drug company.  Some of the hinterland of Pfizer can be found in a couple of articles from Guardian journalist Sarah Boseley, one of which is from December last year :

“……….in 1996, the worst-ever African meningitis epidemic hit Nigeria's northern states. Doctors struggling to bring it under control over a period of three months recorded more than 109,000 cases of meningococcal (cerebrospinal) meningitis and 11,717 deaths.  Kano's infectious diseases hospital, a small collection of concrete buildings inside a sandy compound, was overwhelmed, even after teams from Médecins sans Frontières arrived. They were dealing with not one but three epidemics – measles and cholera had broken out as well. Children were being seen and treated in overcrowded halls and corridors. It was chaos.

And then a chartered DC-9 flew in from the US. On board were doctors from Pfizer, the world's biggest pharmaceutical company, and better medical equipment than the African town had ever seen. They had come to conduct a trial of an oral antibiotic called Trovan, which they wanted to test in children with meningitis against the "gold-standard" treatment of the western world, ceftriaxone. They took over part of the hospital and dosed 200 children, half with Trovan and half with ceftriaxone. And then they left, leaving behind some surplus drugs and equipment for the hospital.  MSF's doctors were appalled at an exercise they felt was opportunistic and inappropriate. "It was not a time for a drug trial at all," says Jean Hervé Bradol, former president of MSF France, to whom the Kano teams were reporting at the time. "They were panicking in the hospital, overrun by cases on the verge of dying. The team were shocked that Pfizer continued the so-called scientific work in the middle of hell."

But the drug is not to be found in African pharmacies. It was trialled on African children, but never intended for Africa. Pfizer aimed to sell it in the USA and Europe – and yet its licence was withdrawn in Europe because of concern over liver toxicity. It is not licensed anywhere for children.”

So.  Our NHS is being run by a government which is seemingly giving up on the struggle to eliminate discrimination and deliver equality, it is quietly condoning continuing cuts in the numbers of staff employed to deliver the health services we need, and operations which might help you or your family improve their health are being cancelled at a record high of over 16,700 a year.  It has dumped the idea of recognising the work desperately needed to eliminate discrimination in the NHS, while at the same time being prepared to pay over £1,000 for a dinner table at which NHS bums can break bread with some questionable dinner guests.

Update : 3rd July 2012
In a story breaking on the BBC - GlaxoSmithKline is to pay $3bn (£1.9bn) in the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history.

The drug giant is to plead guilty to promoting two drugs for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a diabetes drug to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The settlement will cover criminal fines as well as civil settlements with the federal and state governments.

The case concerns 10 drugs, including Paxil, Wellbutrin, Avandia and Advair.

Deputy US Attorney General James Cole told a news conference in Washington DC that the settlement was "unprecedented in both size and scope".