Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Judges ruling knocks back privatisation of primary care

Socialist Resistance no38  |  page 5

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

THE TAIL end of August brought a stunning victory in

the Court of Appeal against vatise primary health care in part of Derbyshire.

Local resident Pam Smith, backed by Keep Our NHS Public and sympathetic lawyers won a legal battle to stop the US-owned company UnitedHealth Europe from lake over a contact lo rul

GP surgeries in Langwith and Cresswell, two former mining Villages. ices which over the last 10-15 years have seen a shift of resources and care from institutional to community-based services.

One positive response to the cutbacks has been the emergence of active campaigns in defence of mental health care, including the UNISON-led "Hands Off SLAM" campaign in South East London which has set out to involve service users, local communities and advocacy groups in the fightback.

To stem the tide of cuts, it is urgent to raise the profile of mental health and force local politicians and NHS chiefs to recognise the reality.

Spending on mental health has dwindled from just 14% of NHS budgets in 1997 to 11% in 2006: if this decline is not halted, the service will be pushed back to the bad old days of institutionalised care.

The Court ruled that the North Eastern Derbyshire Primary Care Trust had failed properly to consult local residents before provisionally awarding the contract UHE, which is chaired by Simon Stevens, Tony Blair's former health adviser and an architect of New Labour's marketising and privatising NHS 'reforms'.

United Health, one of the largest US for-profit health corporations, clearly saw Derbyshire as one area it might get its foot in the door to open up a since PCTs now face having to consult widely with the public before tendering, rather than the NE Derbyshire method of smuggling their plans through with minimal discussion and then simply refusing answer questions or meel local people to explain themselves.

The contract to provide GP

Langwith will have to be retendered by a newly-merged (and possibly even accountable) Hess Derbyshire PCT. However it is possible that Stevens may have given up, and settled for the one contract the company secured local Ravenscourt Park Hospital,