Rob Webster, West Yorkshire & Harrogate STP leader, is a World Economic Forum global corporate stooge

In 2012, West Yorkshire and Harrogate Sustainability and Transformation Plan leader Rob Webster was a World Economic Forum workshop participant,  supporting the Forum’s project to produce reports, co-scripted with privateering global management consultancy company McKinsey & Co, on “sustainable health systems”.

Remember – “sustainable” is code for “cuts”.

2012 was the year when the World Economic Forum opened the throttle on the Shock Doctrine – when global corporations made the most of the global economic shock that resulted from the banksters’ crash to impose their own profiteering practices on governments and public services as well as on faltering and failing businesses that they gobbled up and asset stripped. The World Economic Forum 2012 called this “The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models”

The Sustainability and Transformation Plans are basically the World Economic Forum/McKinsey reports on “sustainable health systems”, applied to the NHS in England.

Along with Rob Webster, Amanda Doyle the Sustainability and Transformation Plan leader for Cumbria was another participant in the World Economic Forum workshop on the first of the “financially sustainable health system” reports.

Simon Stevens acted as Project Steward of the Steering Board for the first World Economic Forum sustainable health system report. On the Steering Board, he worked with chief executives of leading healthcare companies such as Apax Partners, Novartis, Merck, Medtronic and Kaiser Permanente, as well as the Directors of Health at the World Bank, the WHO, and the European Commission. At the time Stevens was head of United Health’s Global Division, rather than chief executive of the NHS, though some might argue the roles are interchangeable.

The Working Group of experts who “supported the projects approach and methodology” included Michael MacDonnell, then Senior Fellow from Imperial College’s Centre for Global Health Innovation, now acting as head of policy for the STP framework as a whole.

(Update 26.6.21: In September 2018 Michael Macdonnell  did a runner to join Google’s Deep Mind Health. His job was to strengthen DeepMind’s partnerships in the NHS and overseas, with the aim of applying Artificial Intelligence to clinical practice. He then went on to Google Health and, in Sept 2020, to Sensyne Health -more info here.)

Why does this matter? Well the World Economic Forum, which meets at Davos, is where the transnational capitalist class does its work of extending the influence of global corporations as a whole. This can clearly be seen in the policy framework of STPs. Rob Webster, Amanda Doyle, Simon Stevens, Michael MacDonnell and the rest of them are stooges for global corporations and we should kick them out of the NHS now.

Thanks to the Devil’s Dictionary of Healthcare for this information.

Simon Stevens is now a member of the WEF Value in Healthcare project Executive Board which this year has produced a report called Value in Healthcare Laying the Foundation for Health System Transformation. It sounds like what is going on in the STPs with the Right Care/ ACOs fixed population budgets stuff that is at the root of increasing restrictions and denials of care,  in order to limit treatment to patients who offer the best return on investment.