Educational Media Reviews Online

This revelatory work dives deep into the struggling National Health Services (NHS) of Britain. Despite its being a socialized healthcare system since 1948, lapses in regulation and impinging corporate entities are threatening the quality and sustainability of healthcare in the UK. One by one, pieces of the NHS, be it entire hospitals, practices, ambulance services or the like, are being sold to private companies. Under disingenuous terms such as "partnership," "leverage," and "reform," patients must cope with often inferior private services from under- or unqualified care takers using substandard equipment. Interviews and vignettes of citizens, healthcare workers, and whistleblowers illustrate the cost-cutting measures that often result in needless protraction of an illness and/or death. Furthermore, the financial structure of these buyouts often burdens remaining NHS elements into long-term debt.

As one comes to expect from veteran British film maker John Pilger, The Dirty War on the National Health is an unrelenting and often heartbreaking look into the corporatization of British nationalized healthcare, testing the proposal that "Markets will improve healthcare." Although Pilger makes frequent references to rankings and general trends on these matters, the film would have benefited greatly from more hard, numeric data, and graphical representations thereof. Nevertheless, this work is an engrossing and timely examination, striking a distinct balance between the high-level issues affecting policy and system structure, and the personal level of patients and their families being marginalized.

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