PUBLIC HEALTH NOT PRIVATE WEALTU Public health not private wealth. Our Health Service Not for Sale march to save the NHS, London in May. Deadly squeeze on our NHS John Lister
Health services in England are facing a deadly combination of unprecedented and massive spending cuts (dressed up as "efficiency savings") with Andrew Lansley's reactionary plans to fragment services and privatise provision of care under his health
For many people the most visible aspect of the crisis is the cuts: every week produces a new toll of cuts in the tens of millions in high profile hospital services in, but also in less high profile areas such as mental health and community health services. As this article is written the most recent cuts are the Birmingham plan to axe up to 740 beds (15 to 20% of the total in the city's hospitals: plans for £39 million in cuts at Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital: and cuts in Staffordshire, Worcestershire, and across
Stark warnings of the consequences of some of these cuts come from figures in Nottingham, which show that the closure of 96 beds in the Queens Medical Centre has led to massive increases in waiting times for accident and emergency services, not least in because the trust has faced a 9% increase in numbers
Yet at the same time a survey of two thirds of PCTs by the GP magazine Pulse
THE CUTS, FIGHT FOR EVERY JOB We won't pay or their crisis THE NES:
OF CAME RON'S
N BIG LIE has revealed plans which assume massive reductions averaging 31% this year in A&E attendances, and 15% reductions in hospital admissions by next April. These cuts are quite simply impossible to achieve in the timescale - and may actually be impossible to achieve at all, not least in the context of the hefty cuts in social care and community services which would have to provide an infrastructure of support to keep patients away from hospital.
The hospital cuts are interesting also in that they are now hitting some of the high profile foundation trusts which until now have been piling up surpluses, and whose finances have until now been largely concealed behind a wall of secrecy. Other hospitals facing the most severe problems include those funded through the Private Finance initiative (PFI) where overhead costs are high and rising, in some cases pushed higher by the current rate of inflation.
So while trusts such as Barts and the London are now planning to close beds in new hospitals have not yet opened, other PFI hospitals such as Portsmouth's Queen Alexandra are closing beds that have only just been expensively built, and for which the trust will still have to pay the full cost over the next 30 years or so. Some first wave PFI hospitals are now already in the
11 CUI HER T THE MLALTH ERVICE Philip Wolmuth/reportdigital.co.uk situation where they have paid 2 to 3 times over the capital cost of the hospital, but now closing beds and sacking staff to balance the books ... with another 20 years or more to pay. And just in case anyone thought it couldn't get worse, Monitor, the regulator that Andrew Lansley wants to oversee the whole NHS, has warned trusts that the "efficiency savings" target needs to be up to 50% higher than the unprecedented 4% per year proposed by Lansley - making the target almost £30 billion instead of an already an achievable £20 billion. Don't trust Clegg with our NHS!
Andrew Lansley's Health Bill to fragment and privatise much of the NHS now seems set to be delaved as a result of the belated opposition to some of its proposals from the Liberal Democrats at their spring conference.
This should be worrying, because those that should be to the forefront of the fight against the Bill-the health unions, the professional bodies, and even - dare we say - the Labour Party, have been either muted or ineffective in challenging the Bill, and in explaining its consequences to the wider public. We need to see significant
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fighting or reinforcing social oppression? moves from the unions to enable a campaign which can defeat this legislation.
Some of the strongest critiques of the Bill and come from the least likely sources: the Commons Public Accounts Committee, no bunch of radicals, made a serious scathing comments picking up aspects of the Bill which had been missed by the entire committee stage discussion. The man chosen by David Cameron to head up the so-called "listening exercise" on the Bill, Prof Steve Field, previously a big fan of the White Paper, has also come out with comments declaring the proposals "unworkable" and warning that they could threaten to destroy local services.
The trouble with these type of criticisms is that they are generally framed, as are the LibDem policy proposals from their spring conference, in the context of amendments to the legislation, leaving many of its dangerous proposals intact, and creating the illusion that a few tinkering changes make it acceptable.
Letters sent out by Tory MPs in response to concerned constituents indicate that the entire way in which the Bill has has hinged on a tissue of lies, deceptions,
It's clear that only a few MPs have read