by Unity

This morning’s guest post by Zarathustra, of the excellent Mental Nurse blog, flagged up the existence of a right-wing campaign group calling itself ‘Nurses for Reform’, and as Lib Con’s resident data hound that naturally prompted me to ask a very pertinant question:

Just exactly how many of the people behind ‘Nurses for Reform’ are actually nurses?

Is this actually a genuine organisation that can point to a significant level of support within the nursing profession or it is, like the Taxpayers’ Alliance, just another small, well funded, right-wing front organisation with a name carefully chosen to mislead the naive and unwary into taking it for something it almost certainly isn’t?

So who, exactly, are ‘Nurses for Reform’?

Well, their director and primary mouthpiece is Dr Helen Evans RGN and she is, indeed, a nurse with 20 years experience in the NHS under her belt and a PhD in health management from Brunel University. So she’s a doctor, but not in the medical sense of the term.

As for her organisation, it claims to be a ‘growing pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-oriented reform of European healthcare systems’, although evidence of any links to like-minded nurses organisations or campaign groups are a bit thin on the ground.

The other noticeable feature of the NFR website is, with the exception of a page listing members of advisory board, the marked lack of reference to anyone other than Dr Helen Evans, who appears to be the site’s sole contributor, contact point and, for all anyone knows, chief cook and bottle-washer.

Not exactly a flying start then, but there is an advisory board, so maybe we’ll find a few more nurses there…

…or maybe not.

Let’s run down the list, starting with:

Stuart Browning

Browning runs a website called Free Market Cure, which is actively involved in the campaign against Obama’s healthcare reforms and ‘socalised’ medicine and is supported by the Moving Picture Institute. Browning is a film director and entrepreneur with an established reputation for knocking out free-market propaganda films.

Dr Eamonn Butler

Butler is the current director of the Adam Smith Institute and has degrees in Philosophy, Economics and Psychology, although I doubt very much that the latter indicates that he has any background on the clinical side.

Dr Tim Evans

Evans is perhaps best known to bloggers as one of the two big wheels in the Libertarian Alliance, along with Sean Gabb.

He’s also, just for the record, the Chief Executive of the Cobden Centre, a former President and Director General of the Centre for the New Europe and former Executive Director of Public Affairs at the Independent Healthcare Association.

Prior to that, in 1991-1992, he was the Chief Economic and Political Adviser to the Slovak Prime Minister – Dr. Jan Carnogursky – and was Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit. In the late 1980s he was the Assistant Director of the Foundation for Defence Studies and subsequently became a Senior Policy Consultant at the Adam Smith Institute.

When he’s not working with the Cobden Centre, he’s the Chairman of the Economic Policy Centre, Chairman of Global Health Futures Ltd, a Consultant Director and a Senior Fellow with the Adam Smith Institute.

Coincidentally, of course, his wife’s name is Helen… Helen Evans…

Mmm, I’ve heard that name before somewhere?

Shane Frith

Frith is the director of right-wing think-tank Progressive Vision, which recently launched a group called ‘Progressive Conservatives’, chaired by Tory MEP Syed Kamall, as a new group for ‘classical liberals in the Conservative Party’. If anything it looks to be ‘brains’ behind the Hannanite wing of the Tory Party, particularly when pitching for a Singapore-style healthcare system and the break-up of the BBC.

According to Conservative Home, Frith has worked for both Tory MP’s in the UK and National Party MPs in native New Zealand and is a former chair of the International Young Democrat Union. His immediate predecessor in that role was Tory MP Andrew Rosindell.

Ruth Lea

Yes this is the Ruth Lea, economist and former head of policy at the Institute of Directors. You’ve seen her on the TV enough to know her shtick.

So far, we’re running a bit short of actual nurses but at least everyone on the advisory board, so far, has the kind of public profile that would make NFR look a bit ridiculous were it to try to conceal information about them.

That’s all about to change.

Robert LeFever

LeFever is billed simply as a ‘blogger’, although I can’t link to his blog at the moment because Google is putting up one of its ‘this site may be harmful to your computer’ messages against its search engire reference. That said, modesty appears not to LeFever’s strong suit as Google does provide this quotation from his blog:

“Dr Robert Lefever is a Darwin of our times, speaking a truth regardless of who it may upset; his insights and ideas will prove him to be a man way ahead of …”

Apparently, the missing words at the end of the quotation are “…his time in years to come. Anyone seeking The [sic] real promise of addiction recovery should work only with Dr Robert Lefever.”, which is just as well as no one could accuse him of being a man ahead of his own ego or promotional bullshit.

What NFR don’t see fit to mention is LeFever’s personal interest in a family-run private rehab clinic (PROMIS). Until fairly recently, Robert LeFever was usually described in the media as the clinic’s director, although he’s no longer listed in the staff page, unlike his son, Robin LeFever, the clinic’s managing director.

Dr Robert LeFever was a GP before getting into the rehab business and while his son, Robin, lays claim to a BSc in Psychology on the clinic’s website, he’s not listed on either of the British Psychological Society’s professional registers – which cover chartered psychologists and a very limited number of psychotherapists – so one would hope that he sticks firmly to management and leave the treatment side of things to others.

In 1998, Robin told the BBC that he he’d been addicted to cannabis in an article that describes him as ‘running a marijuana rehabilitation centre’. Three years later he was billed, by Glasgow’s Sunday Mail, as a ‘Scots-born financial whizz-kid’ who’d led a ‘seedy double life’ as a drug addict in a feature article published under the headline, ‘Robin thought he was OK.. “heroin addicts didn’t wear suits and work in the city; THE INCREDIBLE RICHES TO RAGS STORY OF A PROFESSIONAL JUNKIE” [their capitals, not mine].

More recently Robert has cropped up in a few places with the claim that he too was once an addict – gambling, shopping and work, apparently – but he’s over all that now, save for his sole remaining addiction to maudlin political reminiscences, such as this lengthy article, which appeared in a Libertarian Alliance publication, under their copyright, in 2003. According to Robert, life was just peachy as an NHS GP until the introduction of Harold Wilson’s ‘social contract’ in 1974, although the reference at the end to “my friend Tim Bell, Lady Thatcher’s PR guru” and the name check for Ayn Rand suggest that he’s not the most unbiased observer of those times.

Moving on, we have…

Robert McIndoe

According to NFR, McIndoe is a ‘British Nurse’ [Hooray! A nurse at Last!]

According to Spinprofiles, McIndoe’s real background is…

‘founder and Managing Director’ of a marketing agency called The Marketing House and an advisor for Nurse for Reform, a free market lobby group. According to his ‘LinkedIn’ profile, McIndoe is ‘Senior Business Consultant’ at Logica (December 2007 — Present); Owner, The Marketing House (February 2001 — Present); ‘Principal Consultant’ Capita Advisory Services (March 2006 — October 2007); ‘Communications Consultant’ NHS Connecting for Health (2005 — 2006); ‘Stakeholder Management & Communications Team Leader’ CSC (2004 — 2005). According to the Marketing House his past appointments have included ‘senior public relations, communications and marketing roles for The Nuffield Trust, Surrey Oaklands NHS Trust, University College London Hospitals, The Royal Hospitals Trust and Hays DX.

…although he does have a nursing qualification (RNM), which makes him a registered mental nurse, even if his academic background is that of an MA in Fine Arts from the University of St Andrews, which he followed up with an MBA in Creativity, Marketing and Finance via that fine socialist invention, the Open University and an MA in Theatre & Performance Studies at Rose Bruford College.

As is apparent from his profile, his ideological views on the NHS haven’t stopped him screwing money out of it as marketing consultant but, looking on the bright side, at least Nurses for Reform has managed to justify the use of a plural despite having previously given the impression that we might be looking here at something that was actually ‘Nurse for Reform’.

That brings to the final name on the list:

Mr. John Wilden MRCP, FRCS

Wilden is a ‘leading neurosurgeon with a practice in Harley Street’ according to his profile at the Adam Smith Institute.

According to Grant Thornton, the London-based global network of independent accounting and consulting firms.

“Global Healthcare Futures (GHF) is a UK company that is the brain child of John Wilden, a former specialist and consultant neurosurgeon. GHF is developing and promoting software products for “Time to Cure” and “Cost to Cure” Common Diseases based on the advances of molecular biology and other technologies which will underpin the fast looming world of curative global healthcare, thereby ushering in a new age of diminishing healthcare costs across the developed and developing world”.

Mmm… Global Healthcare Futures… I’ve heard that name before, somewhere?

Silly me, I forgot to include the citation…

Dr Tim Evans, Chairman of Global Health Futures

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting deja vu?