Investigate to what extent this viewpoint, and limited public funding for medical research, come into conflict. There is a limited amount of public funding for medical research, which causes conflict between many interested groups of people. It is a battle between the government and the public, whilst new ideas and plans are put forward to resolve the problem. The main association is the ‘Medical Research Council” (MRC), which is funded by the taxpayer. They promote research and train skilled people in all areas of medical and related science with the aim of improving human health.
However, on Wednesday June 4th, 2003, MP’s claimed that MRC’s financial mismanagement had damaged research and had been deliberately misleading. This resulted in a substantial drop in its funds for new grants. To support the idea of damaged and inaccurate research, two prestigious UK research journals united to call for improvements on the way medical research is conducted. They call for a central compulsory worldwide register of all controlled clinical trial, which would be open for public inspection. This would allow people to find out exactly what is under investigation in any particular disease area. By doing this, the public’s trust will be gained and it will end any future uproar on the matter.
The NHS budget is another central conflict; there is a growing perception that healthcare is far better in Europe than the UK and this is due to the amount of money spent on it; “Whatever index you look at, we spend less on health care in the UK, than any other comparable European nation” (Quoted by Dr. Peter Holden) However, to counteract this, Gorden Brown revealed that the NHS budget will reach �68.7bn by 2003/2004, some �19.4bn more than in 1999-2000. Although, when BBC carried out a questionnaire, which resulted in 67% expecting health care to remain at current levels or worsen over the next decade, which quite clearly highlights that the public are questioning Brown’s promise.
The outcome of the limited funding within the NHS can result to be life threatening; the outcome includes the crisis of bed shortages, cancelled operations, over crowed casualty departments and one women was so desperate to have her operation that she faked bleeding. However, to solve this problem of waiting a significantly long time for an operation, a Judge has ruled that they may go abroad for the operation and send the bill to the government and this is shown in appendix 2.
Many people feel that taxation can no longer fund the NHS and a survey carried out by the Social Market Foundation obtained the following results: Not many people are prepared to pay more money due to the large amount of tax that they pay already, but 3/4 of the public want more lottery money to be spent on the NHS. Overall, the basic structure and principles of the NHS are incorrect according to the public and this is proved in a questionnaire done by The Daily Telegraph-appendix 1. There are elements in this world that suggest that medical research is doing a significant amount and this is due to all the new discoveries, such as cloning and designer babies.
On 23rd February 1997, it was announced that scientists had cloned a sheep and it had a six-month old lamb named Dolly. Dolly was the phenomena which, lead science into a new era, creating new possibilities. Cloning people is a force that gains support from, among others, those who want to start a family and cannot do it by natural means; as over 10% of couples have problems. The second area of research is ‘therapeutic’ cloning to make new cells or replace damaged organs. An example of this would be the designer baby, Jamie Whitaker, who was born to donate cells to treat his brother’s rare form of anaemia.
There are many associations, which rely on donations, such as “Cancer Funding UK”; their vision is to conquer cancer through world-class research, aiming to control the disease within two generations. They create funding by encouraging public donations and they also encourage people to hold fund raising events and they sell their own products, such as the one below. However, cancer accounted for 22% of deaths in 2000 and yet Cancer Research only received 3% of government funding. It has become evident that morally a human life is priceless as life is sacred and not enough money is spent to protect this. However, scientifically a price can be put on life, due to the fact that cloning has been discovered.