Doctors for Reform Steering Committee
Dr Paul Charlson
MRCGP DRCOG DPD DOccMed
"I support DfR because it is an active high profile organisation which asks important questions about healthcare in UK. I firmly believe in a fair helathcare system where there is equal access to all for NHS treatment regardless of income. I generally support the principal of "free at the point of use" however I do feel that a wider range of charges for services will be necessary in the future. I believe the state should be responsible for providing a reasonably comprehensive healthcare service. I also believe in choice and competition in terms of provision and funding can complement and enhance state provision.
Empowering people to take reoponsibility for their health is very importamt and Government must encourage this through education and incentives. The danger of too much state provision and a free at the point of use system is that the individual becomes disempowered. Finding the right balance is difficult.
As a professional I am continually disappointed by the inability of the NHS to innovate and believe this is a significant sourse of disatisfaction within the NHS workfore. This is something that must be tackled urgently and some of the needless bureaucracy should be removed.
Much of the debate on the NHS has become polarised and emotive. Improvements can only be achievd by open and honest debate about solutions to the current problems the NHS faces and DfR has repeatedly stimulated that debate"
Paul Charlson is a GP in East Yorkshire who also works as a GPSI in dermatology and cosmetic medicine. He is Chair of the Conservative Medical Society and member of the 2020health.org board.
Dr Christoph Lees
"The group was set up in 2002 to give an independent voice to Doctors who believed in the fundamental philosophy of the NHS, but whose experience led them to the conclude that other ways to fund and deliver a universal coverage system should be examined. By changing the funding model to make services directly responsive and accountable to patients, and allowing individuals to 'top up' a good basic coverage system where desired, efficiencies could accrue and more funding would enter the service. We have campaigned with significant impact on this issue, Maternity Care, Patient 'Top-ups' and Cancer Care over the last few years and are supported by 1000 Doctors. DfR holds regular seminars at the offices of Reform, our host organization with whom we share research and administrative staff, in central London."
Christoph Lees, Consultant in Obstetrics & Fetal Maternal Medicine.
Professor Karol Sikora
"Reform is the only way we can get efficiency into our healthcare system. Choice and competition are badly needed to drive efficiency and evolution in the NHS. Both Conservatives and Labour have tried to introduce these concepts but both bottled out at a critical point.
Single payer - single provider monopolies riddled with powerful vested interests lead to stagnation. Only radical reform can bring an evolution of services tailrooed to changing patient needs. We need to move from patients being a nuisance as service users to welcome customers as in any service industry."
Karol Sikora is Medical Director of CancerPartnersUK which is creating the largest independent UK cancer network. He was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cancer Medicine at Imperial College School of Medicine and is still honorary Consultant Oncologist at Hammersmith Hospital, London. He is Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of SourceBioscience PLC, Britain’s leading cancer diagnostic company. He is Dean of Britain’s first independent Medical School at the University of Buckingham and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
He studied medical science and biochemistry at Cambridge, where he obtained a double first. After clinical training he became a house physician at The Middlesex Hospital and registrar in oncology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He then became a research student at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge working with Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Sydney Brenner. He obtained his PhD and became a clinical fellow at Stanford University, California before returning to direct the Ludwig Institute in Cambridge. He has been Clinical Director for Cancer Services at Hammersmith for 12 years and established a major cancer research laboratory there funded by the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. He chaired Help Hammer Cancer, an appeal that raised £8m towards the construction of the new Cancer Centre at Hammersmith. He became Deputy Director (Clinical Research) of the ICRF. From 1997 to 1999 he was Chief of the WHO Cancer Programme and from 1999 to 2002, Vice President, Global Clinical Research (Oncology) at Pharmacia Corporation.
He has published over 300 papers and written or edited 20 books including Treatment of Cancer - the standard British postgraduate textbook now going to its fifth edition and most recently The Economics of Cancer Care. He is on the editorial board of several journals and is the founding editor of Gene Therapy and Cancer Strategy. He was a member of the UK Health Department’s Expert Advisory Group on Cancer (the Calman-Hine Committee), the Committee on Safety of Medicines and remains an adviser to the WHO. He currently directs a cancer drug donation programme in Africa.
Dr Maurice Slevin
Professor Stephen Smith
Professor Jim Thornton
"I hate the waste and inefficiency in much of the present NHS. My experience of social insurance systems elsewhere in Europe is that they provide better care for patients. I am impressed with the small steps the NHS has taken recently to create an internal market, and 
to open this up to diverse providers. It is early days, and there are teething problems, but these are steps in the right direction."
Jim Thornton is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, at Nottingham University, and honorary consultant at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.
He is director of the Nottingham Clinical Trials Unit. He was the chief investigator of the Growth Restriction Intervention Trial (Lancet 2004), and is currently lead investigator of trials on the management of obstetric cholestasis, and the use of nicotine patches to help women stop smoking in pregnancy.
He worked in a mission hospital in Kenya for four years in the early 1980’s, and stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in Nottingham in 2005. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of the European and British Journals of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.