Thousands of protesters will overwhelm the Liberal Democrat conference in Sheffield tomorrow in an attempt to derail the party’s love affair with NHS privatisation.
Police predict that up to 10,000 protesters including health workers and campaigners will vastly outnumber the 2,000 or so delegates expected to attend the Lib Dems’ spring conference at City Hall.
A two-and-a-half-metre-high “ring of steel” has been built outside the conference centre as part of a police security operation reportedly costing £2 million.
Speaking at an anti-cuts rally in Sheffield tomorrow (Saturday 12 March), Unite general secretary Len McCluskey is expected to say: “It’s time for Liberal Democrats to break with the coalition and come over to the side of the British people.
“Nick Clegg has turned Lib Dems into shock troops for a Tory counter-revolution that aims to dismantle everything ordinary British people have built up over generations – the NHS, the welfare state, the very fabric of our communities threatened by the cuts.
“We know that Lib Dem voters reject the course he has chosen. Polls and by-election results – not least in Barnsley up the road – tell us that. But I have come to Sheffield to appeal – not to Nick Clegg – but to Lib Dem councillors, activists and, yes, Lib Dem MPs, to put the people first, put their consciences first and come over to the opposition where they will find a warm welcome.”
Traditionally going first in the conference season, it’s going to be the Lib Dems turn to get it in the neck this week in Sheffield. Two marches are planned against the mini-me of the Condem alliance, firstly on Friday at 4.30pm at the town hall and then on Saturday, meeting at 11am at Devonshire Green.
Also planned is a mass walk-out from schools on the Friday, under the slogan, “Against a government of millionaires making thousands unemployed and starving the poor to pay for a crisis created by the institutions of the rich”.
According to reports on Sheffield Indymedia known activists have been put under surveillance by an increasingly nervous police force.
HUNDREDS of protestors marched on Sheffield’s City Hall this evening as, inside, the Lib Dem Spring Conference got underway.
The mood was angry as the crowd voiced their concerns about tuition fees and public spending cuts, shouting: ‘Clegg Clegg Clegg, out out out!’ and ‘Shame on you for turning blue.’
There was a strong police presence at the eight foot metal fence surrounding the perimeter of the City Hall, which protected the delegates as they arrived for the three-day event.
This Saturday is decision time for the Liberal Democrats. Will the party back market reforms that put the NHS at risk, or will it listen to the record number of delegates who wish to amend them?
The Lib Dems uniquely still allow party members to decide policy, and do so in public. The motion from the leadership at our conference welcomes the declared aspirations of Andrew Lansley’s healthcare reforms, and then seeks to justify them with dodgy statistics that depend more on eating and smoking habits 20 years ago than any previous structural reform. It fails to even start to mount a defence of the marketisation aspects of the health and social care bill, and is unable to identify any true increase in democratic accountability, let alone local control.
So it’s no surprise that the amendments Shirley Williams and I have tabled calling for proper accountability and safeguards against privatisation have attracted such support from delegates.
Rage Against the Lib Dems – Sheffield Spring Conference11th and 12th March
This Friday teatime saw a lively gathering of over 500 protesters around the ring of steel erected by the police in Sheffield city centre. This was the warm up for the main demo tomorrow (Saturday 12th assemble 11am Devonshire Green) when police are predicting 5-10,000 on Sheffield’s streets. It must have seemed a great idea months ago when they booked their spring conference in Sheffield. Clegg was once relatively popular in his Sheffield Hallam constituency and the council is Lib Dem controlled – for now. But they are probably regretting the decision now.
Sheffield people have good reasons to hate Nick Clegg and his party along with the rest of the country – Sheffield has two big universities and thousands of public sector workers. It is also one of the most unequal of Britain’s cities with areas of considerable wealth (e.g. the west of the city – Clegg’s Sheffield Hallam constituency) contrasting with areas of great deprivation where people rely on public and community services to get by. There was also the Forgemasters betrayal, where the Coalition cancelled a major investment deal which would have revitalised the local steel industry. The Lib Dem council is now busy cutting vital services and funding to the voluntary sector – this will hit Sure Start provision, Advice Centres, youth services and much more, with hundreds losing their jobs in the council, vacant posts remaining unfilled, and many more jobs affected in the voluntary sector and in arms length agencies providing services on behalf of the council.
Yet so scared are the Lib Dems at facing their critics that the Council and the police have agreed on making the centre of our city into a huge no go area, surrounding the City Hall with a double layer of steel fencing and a huge numbers of police – an operation that is costing £2 million! Tonight, people let the delegates know what they thought of them – a young and lively crowd of students and workers, some in Clegg masks, shouted ‘Judas!’ and ‘scum!’ and ‘you won’t be in parliament next time’, until we were hoarse.
The first day of the Liberal Conference in Sheffield was met by protests [ 1 | 2 | 3 ] outside the Town Hall starting at around 4pm. At around 4:45pm the protest moved up to Barkers Pool and proceeded to chant at the conference delegates outside the City Hall. The protest then moved to the top of Barkers Pool, at the bottom of Division Street and got noisier. A critical mass later in the evening brought Ecclesall Road to a complete standstill. The Star reported that there were 800 protestors and has posted a video and a timeline of the protest.
A convergence space has been opened on The Moor in the shop next door to Debenhams[ photo].
A far bigger protest is expected tomorrow, assembling at 11am on Devonshire Green, however a warning that it might be kettled there has led to a call to meet outside the Town Hall instead. See the Massive Protests Expected at the Liberal Democrats Spring Conference in Sheffield feature article for more details
Nick Clegg has sought to steel his Liberal Democrat activists to face demonstrations outside their party’s spring conference, telling them at the opening rally that being in government meant they must get used to protest.
The party, he said, had to realise they had “put down the placards and taken up the reins of power”.
Some 3,000 activists, the highest number ever, have registered for the conference in Sheffield, where Clegg is MP for Sheffield Hallam. It is the second since the party entered government, and a test of its ardour for the coalition. Its latest poll rating this weekend was 9%.
THE ‘All Businesses Open As Usual’ sign is blocked from view by half a dozen yellow-jacketed policemen, writes Features Editor Martin Smith.
Clearly this is far from business as usual.
Sheffield doesn’t normally have 1,000 policemen from three different forces on the streets.
It doesn’t have the 8ft Stalag Sheffield steel and concrete fence around the City Hall and it doesn’t usually have deserted department stores on a Friday afternoon.
The Liberal Democrat Spring Conference started last night and leader Nick Clegg walked in unnoticed by anyone just before 4.30pm, blue suit, head held high and flanked by security.
Nick Clegg has warned Lib Dem activists they must get used to protests now they are in power, in a speech to the party’s spring conference in Sheffield.
Party leader Mr Clegg urged Lib Dem members to “hold your nerve”, saying “with power comes protest”.
Thousands of students and trade unionists are expected to stage a protest outside the conference later.
And some Lib Dems are expected to turn their fire on the deputy PM over the planned shake-up of the NHS.
In an emergency motion, former MP Evan Harris, a member of the party’s influential federal policy committee, will call on Lib Dem ministers to resist the coalition’s plan to give 80% of the NHS budget for commissioning services in England to GPs.
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
Thousands of protesters will overwhelm the Liberal Democrat conference in Sheffield tomorrow in an attempt to derail the party’s love affair with NHS privatisation.
Police predict that up to 10,000 protesters including health workers and campaigners will vastly outnumber the 2,000 or so delegates expected to attend the Lib Dems’ spring conference at City Hall.
Women trade unionists warned that the Con-Dems are planning an assault on the NHS worse than anything tried by Margaret Thatcher.
Delegates at the TUC women’s conference in Eastbourne said the coalition’s planned “reforms” would put lives at risk and turn the health service into nothing more than a corporate logo slapped on a privately run system.
“Even Margaret Thatcher didn’t dare do to the NHS what this government is trying to do,” Chartered Society of Physiotherapists speaker Kim Gainsborough said.
The Health and Social Care Bill could put the NHS into the hands of company shareholders, CSP delegate Kim Gainsborough told the TUC Women’s Conference.
‘Promoting competition runs through all 354 pages of the bill,’ said Ms Gainsborough, a women’s health physiotherapist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.
‘That raises the prospect of private companies, including big multinationals, taking over our NHS, accountable to their shareholders rather than to us.’
This Saturday is decision time for the Liberal Democrats. Will the party back market reforms that put the NHS at risk, or will it listen to the record number of delegates who wish to amend them?
The Lib Dems uniquely still allow party members to decide policy, and do so in public. The motion from the leadership at our conference welcomes the declared aspirations of Andrew Lansley’s healthcare reforms, and then seeks to justify them with dodgy statistics that depend more on eating and smoking habits 20 years ago than any previous structural reform. It fails to even start to mount a defence of the marketisation aspects of the health and social care bill, and is unable to identify any true increase in democratic accountability, let alone local control.
So it’s no surprise that the amendments Shirley Williams and I have tabled calling for proper accountability and safeguards against privatisation have attracted such support from delegates.
Last year I described the Government’s Health White Paper as “an avoidable train crash”. Since then, with the Health Bill published and GP commissioning consortia rolling out, I admit I was wrong. It will be far worse.
The resulting carnage of a dismembered and disintegrated health service will provide rich pickings for private companies and the unscrupulous among private GP contractors. The fractured NHS will be monumentally difficult to hold together.
Ministers have been desperately cobbling together selective statistics which they hope will demonstrate that the NHS is not as good as it could or should be. It’s true and it could be a lot better. But that doesn’t justify the complete trashing of all of the institutional architecture of the NHS.
Early on in last year’s election campaign, the Tory party put up posters all over the country showing an obviously airbrushed picture of David Cameron alongside the slogan “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”.
Cameron had previously told the Tory party conference that the NHS was one of the 20th century’s greatest achievements. “Tony Blair explained his priorities in three words: education, education, education. I can do it in three letters: NHS.” If, as he hoped, he was elected, there would be “no more pointless and disruptive reorganisations” and any change would be driven by the needs of doctors and patients.
It was probably Cameron’s most successful piece of campaigning. People who had previously entertained doubts about his intentions felt reassured that, whatever else might happen if the Tories were elected, the NHS would be left untouched.
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
Unite’s campaign to stop the privatisation of the NHS Blood Service has received huge public support which is still growing. In under a week, the union’s petition demanding that David Cameron stops the blood money was signed by 25,000 people
The petition was launched last Friday 3rd March and the Twitter campaign #bloodmoney began yesterday 9 March. In just one day almost 10,000 signed up.
On 16 February, the Health Service Journal learned that the Department of Health’s commercial directorate held talks with private providers about running parts of the NHS Blood and Transplant service. Capita and DHL are understood to be interested in taking over parts of the service.
The campaign has struck a chord with the general public who have been signing up at record speed for a Unite union petition. The public are right to be concerned, a study conducted in New Zealand found that there was opposition to profit being made from blood, with 52% of donors unlikely to continue donating if this occurred (see link in notes to editors).
ONE of the most enduring image of last year’s General Election campaign was posters featuring David Cameron and his pledge to “cut the deficit, not the NHS”.
Many noted that his photograph had been airbrushed but it will not be so easy to paper over cracks in the Government’ health policies as this promise comes back to haunt the Prime Minister. Broken promises over the NHS are rarely forgiven by the electorate.
Despite escaping the worst of the cuts affecting the public sector, Mr Cameron was foolish – with hindsight – to guarantee real-term increases in NHS spending at a time of high inflation, as well as backing an unprecedented £20bn efficiency drive.
Now, and over coming months, this pa[i]nful reality will hit frontline services, with hospital bosses in Leeds preparing to announce details of a £55.5m programme of savings.
SOUTHPORT’S MP is at the forefront of a revolt against the Government’s wholesale reform of the NHS.
Lib Dem John Pugh has spoken out against divisive Coalition plans to impose free market-based competition in the health service
Health secretary Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill will hand 80% of the NHS budget to consortia of GPs, who will buy services from providers in the public, private and charity sectors.
Senior Westcountry Liberal Democrats have hit out at plans to “privatise” the NHS, as health reform is poised to be a major fault-line for the coalition.
Writing in today’s Western Morning News, Adrian Sanders, Lib Dem MP for Torbay, urges the Government to “seriously reconsider” proposals.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wants to hand GPs £80 billion of the NHS budget, scrap existing local care trusts and increase the role of private companies in health provision. But Mr Sanders, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for diabetes, argues that claims that “greater marketisation” will improve services is “unfounded”, and will lead to operations being cancelled.
As someone who knows firsthand how the profit motive can wreck a healthcare system – leaving millions of people without coverage and millions of others unable to pay for care even if they do have insurance – I was alarmed to learn about the reforms to the NHS that Prime Minister David Cameron is advocating.
As Channel 4’s recent investigation revealed, those reforms could very easily incentivize GPs to make decisions based on profits instead of clinical need.
To understand how devastating that could be to the people of England, all one has to do is look at the American healthcare system.
Until 2008, I was a top executive at one of America’s largest health insurance companies, CIGNA. The higher up the corporate ladder I climbed – to become head of public relations – the more I could see the often-devastating and even lethal consequences of insurers’ relentless quest for profits. I could not in good conscience continue promoting an industry whose routine practices – put in place to assure profitability – contribute to the unnecessary deaths of many of our citizens.
Addressing the NHS Innovation Expo in London, Earl Howe said that innovative ideas and services in the NHS worth £150bn should be sold abroad to drive growth in the UK economy.
Hospitals should treat more private and foreign patients, or open branches abroad to make money, he said.
Moorefields Eye Hospital already has a centre in Dubai that creates 2.4m for the NHS, he said.
The leader of Scotland’s GPs added his voice to the growing criticism of the health reforms that are being proposed in England. He raised concerns that the changes would commercialise the NHS and increase competition between GP providers.
Addressing the Annual Conference of Scottish Local Medical Committees (LMCs) in Clydebank, Dr Dean Marshall, Chairman of the BMA’s Scottish General Practitioners Committee, said:
“I want to send a message to our politicians in both England and Scotland. Our health service is not a factory, the health service cannot be treated like a commercial enterprise, our patients are not a commodity. We do not support the market based reforms being pushed through in England, where the consequences for patients could be severe indeed. Scotland’s GPs will support colleagues in England to preserve the founding principles of the NHS.”
The UK Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the Con-Dems – intend to destroy the UK’s National Health Service. This is in direct contradiction to Prime Minister David Cameron’s election pledge “I’ll cut the defecit, not the NHS”.
Conservative election poster 2010
The Con-Dem spin machine are very fond of the phrase “doing nothing is not an option”. It’s absolute bullshit and doing nothing is not an option only to opponents of the NHS. The partially devolved governments of Scotland and Wales have decided to support and improve the NHS in its current form.
The Con-Dems also insulted opponents to NHS abolition by saying that they should “grow up”. In the same vein, the considered response is “Keep your fucking hands off our NHS you greedy, evil, lying bastards”.
The Con-Dems attack on the NHS is ideologically driven. Cameron’s thesis of the “Big Society” is nothing less than a return to the Victorian era whereby there is scant private and charitable provision combined with no public accountability. Please, sir, I want some more.
It is reckless and irresponsible to subject poor peoples’ health to the whims of market forces – the very market forces that brought about the current economic crisis.
Nick ‘Tory with a poor memory’ Clegg and the Liberal-Democrats are rightly held responsible for the demolition of the National Health Service – the population recognise that it could not be done without them. The Liberal-Democrats achieved sixth position after the BNP and an independent at the recent Barnsley Central by-election – their credibility has been decimated.
A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
There is a noticably increase in news coverage. Let’s hope that the forthcoming party conferences pay attention.
Patients, health workers, and supporters of the NHS will march through London later today (Wednesday 9 March) to protest at job cuts and the reorganisation of medical services in England.
The protest – called ‘Day X for the NHS’ – starts at 5pm outside the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel Road, London, E1 1BB.
Joining the march will be speech therapists from Southwark, south London, who won some concessions after striking over a threat to cut eleven jobs.
It comes two weeks after the trade union-funded False Economy website revealed 50,000 jobs are set to be axed in the NHS.
An outsourcing company that hopes to make millions of pounds from the most radical shake up of the NHS is secretly providing the government with apparently independent GPs to help ministers sell their controversial reform to patients and staff.
Internal emails obtained by SpinWatch show that the arrangement was agreed just before Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, launched his bill last month to scrap primary care trusts and hand £80bn of the NHS budget to GPs and private health companies.
Tribal, the outsourcing firm with £150m worth of government contracts, supplied a list of friendly GPs to Bill Morgan, Lansley’s special adviser. Morgan is a former lobbyist for private health companies and Tribal confirms that it was in discussions with some of the GPs on the list about future lucrative contracts.
Pro-reform GPs are a key front in the public relations offensive behind Lansley’s health and social care bill, which is currently going through parliament.
UNISON, the UK’s largest union, said today that management consultancy McKinsey’s involvement in one fifth of existing pathfinder consortia* was clear confirmation of Tory plans to drive NHS privatisation. Karen Jennings, UNISON Assistant General Secretary, said:
“UNISON has long been warning that the Tory’s titanic reorganisation would leave the door wide open for private companies to dominate our NHS – and here is the evidence.
“Just one private company – McKinsey – has already signed up one fifth of the pathfinder consortia, and we know other big companies are getting their teeth stuck into large chunks of the rest. They include management consultants and big accountancy firms like KPMG and Price Waterhouse Coopers.
“The health service is about what’s best for patients, not the bottom line. Less than two years ago McKinsey produced a much-derided report which called for more than one hundred thousand health workers to be sacked. Their vision for the NHS is clear, and was widely panned as being disastrous. This is the type of company the Tories are happy to welcome through the front door of our health service.”
Dave Prentis, general secretary of UNISON, the UK’s largest trade union, today pledged a massive fight-back against government plans to privatise parts of the NHS National Blood and Transfusion Service (NHSBT).
Speaking in London to an angry meeting of blood service workers from across the UK, Dave Prentis said:
“This is crunch time for the blood service. The government wants to open it up to private companies with DHL and Capita already in the frame. The prime motive of these companies is money and we will fight this all the way.
“The blood service is the Big Society writ large. Hundreds of thousands of donors regularly give up their blood to help save lives for free, untainted by the profit motive. If any part of the blood service was handed over to companies who are making a profit, then this turns the whole thing on its head.
The NHS is changing so fast that yesterday’s kite-flying proposal is already the new reality.
Just a week or so after Prime Minister David Cameron announced that whole tranches of existing public services would be sent out to tender, and here it is happening, at a primary care trust near you.
The pioneers of plans being piloted by NHS East of England insist providers of care pathways – likely to be GPs in partnership with private firms or possibly charities – will have to meet rigorous ‘quality’ targets. It’s hard to object to a bit of quality, and with a few outcome targets thrown in too, there’s a reassuring echo of the QOF. But this scheme, like another in Guildford also revealed over the past week, builds in another kind of contractual incentive that doesn’t seem quite so harmless. It hands providers the chance to boost profits by reducing referrals and driving down costs.
Schemes like these are supposedly about provision rather than commissioning, but either way the controversy they have generated goes right to the heart of one of the key arguments of principle on the NHS reforms – and one on which GPs are divided. Health secretary Andrew Lansley argues that GPs are the right people to hold budgets and commission services because it is they who take the clinical decisions that have the greatest impact on NHS costs. By ensuring the same people hold both the purse-strings and the stethoscopes, he believes the NHS can finally control its spiralling costs, by putting money at the core of every clinical decision.
The Liberal Democrat leadership has signalled a willingness to rethink its stance on some NHS changes – such as the extension of competition and the accountability of GP commissioning – if the party’s spring conference this weekend votes to rein in the shakeup.
Norman Lamb, parliamentary adviser to Nick Clegg, said: “We listen to the concerns and take them back to government. This is the chance for the party to have its say. We are determined they will have their say.”
Strong support has emerged for an amendment to a motion at this weekend’s conference, demanding that the NHS, rather than the private sector, should be the preferred provider in the health service. The amendment also calls for commissioning to remain a public function, “using the skills and expertise of existing NHS staff rather than subcontracting of commissioning to private companies”.
It says commissioning should be made democratically accountable, and not conducted in private by GP commissioners, as proposed in the health bill.
Opponents of government plans to introduce competition to the NHS have rallied to challenge the plans, which they say would privatise healthcare in the UK.
The well-respected British Medical Association (BMA) is lobbying hard to remove a section of the health and social care bill which would introduce new powers enforcing competition.
The bill would create a new economic regulator called Monitor, with similar powers to the Office of Fair Trading, according to the traditional model of privatising industries, such as gas, water or telecommunications.
But opponents are concerned that Monitor would have a statutory duty to promote competition, something many health experts warn could damage the NHS.
The NHS should not be run in the same way as privatised industries such as water, gas, and telecommunications, the BMA says today.
The warning comes as MPs prepare to debate the sections of the Health and Social Care Bill relating to new powers to enforce competition in the NHS in England.* Under the Bill, the new economic regulator Monitor would have the same powers the Office of Fair Trading has under the 1998 Competition Act, following the model that applies to a number of privatised industries, including gas, telecommunications, electricity and water. It would also have a statutory duty to promote competition in the NHS.
In a new briefing paper, the BMA requests amendments to the Bill removing this duty. It raises concerns that:
* Monitor will focus more on enforcing competition than on the provision of effective healthcare
* Fear of being open to legal challenge could divert healthcare providers and commissioners from their key task of ensuring high quality care
* Existing NHS services could be at risk of arbitrary closure, despite being popular with patients and delivering high quality services
HOSPITAL staff at the country’s biggest NHS trust are bracing themselves for major job cuts under plans to make savings worth more than £50m.
Hundreds of positions are likely to face the axe at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust as health chiefs battle with a new era of austerity in the NHS.
Details of the plans will be made public later today. Talks with unions are arranged for next week but it is expected managers will agree a savings programme worth £55.5m.
The cuts come after the NHS was ordered to make unprecedented efficiencies of at least four per cent in the coming year.
The Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, Hampshire, run by the Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, has cut 700 jobs and ‘closed’ 100 beds. The hospital was rebuilt using private finance and opened in July 2009.
The 700 job cuts, mostly clerical and admin roles, are said to have been achieved by not replacing staff who left over the past 18 months.
The aim is to save £29m this year as the hospital strives to become a foundation trust but even with the cuts the hospital is likely to be £6m over budget.
AN AWARD-WINNING Birmingham A&E service praised for saving the health service £3 million is under threat because of NHS cutbacks.
Health workers have been told their jobs are at risk at the end of this month due to lack of cash for the RAID project at busy City Hospital, in Winson Green.
The 15 staff at RAID – Rapid Assessment Interface and Discharge service –assess patients for psychological problems in City A&E ensuring they get the correct help as mental illness, drug addiction and dementia often go undetected and untreated.
It comes months after it won the renowned Health Service Journal innovation in mental health award last year for saving City Hospital millions of pounds by avoiding unnecessary admissions to medical wards.
A study by healthcare charity the Patients Association has revealed that the number of elective procedures conducted by NHS trusts across England dropped drastically in 2010.
The study found that there were 10,757 fewer procedures carried out in 2010 than 2009, including 11% fewer tonsillectomies, 6% fewer knee replacements, 3% fewer hip replacements and 51% fewer bariatric procedures.
Patients also had to wait longer for surgical procedures; an average of eight days longer for hip and knee replacements, and six days longer for hysterectomies.
Patients Association chief executive, Katherine Murphy, said that patients were being denied access to surgical procedures in 2010 that they would have had if they had needed them in the previous year.
A UNION protest aimed at protecting the National Health Service was held in Torquay’s Union Square yesterday and gathered hundreds of signatures opposing any cuts.
Members of the health union Unison handed out leaflets and had a coffin representing the death of the NHS.
The union is concerned the speed of planned cuts may lead to them being pushed through unchallenged.
Unite’s campaign to stop the privatisation of the NHS Blood Service has received huge public support which is still growing. In under a week, the union’s petition demanding that David Cameron stops the blood money was signed by 25,000 people (see link in notes to editors).
The petition was launched last Friday (4 March) and the Twitter campaign #bloodmoney began yesterday 9 March. In just one day almost 10,000 signed up.
On 16 February the Health Service Journal learned that the Department of Health’s commercial directorate held talks with private providers about running parts of the NHS Blood and Transplant service. Capita and DHL are understood to be interested in taking over parts of the service (see link notes to editors).
The campaign has struck a chord with the general public who have been signing up at record speed for a Unite petition. The public is right to be concerned, a study conducted in New Zealand found that there was opposition to profit being made from blood, with 52 per cent of donors unlikely to continue donating if this occurred (see link in notes to editors).
All aspects of NHS care for entire diseases are to be put out to tender under radical plans to dramatically expand the role of private companies and charities in running the health service, Pulse can reveal.
A pilot set to launch across the east of England will put entire NHS care pathways out to tender, starting with musculoskeletal medicine, respiratory care and elderly care.
The plans will hand private firms, GPs or combinations of the two provider contracts for a fixed amount of money, creating an ‘incentive’ to increase profit margins by delivering cheaper care out of hospital.
The leader of the Scottish GPC has attacked NHS reforms in England as dangerous for patients, and set out an alternative strategy for Scotland’s health service.
Addressing the Scottish LMC Conference in Clydebank today, GPC chair Dr Dean Marshall said the consequences of reforms to increase competition in the NHS could be ‘severe’ for patients.
‘I want to send a message to our politicians in both England and Scotland. Our health service is not a factory, the health service cannot be treated like a commercial enterprise, our patients are not a commodity.
‘We do not support the market-based reforms being pushed through in England, where the consequences for patients could be severe indeed. Scotland’s GPs will support colleagues in England to preserve the founding principles of the NHS.’
Exceptional management will be required in the NHS over the coming years as radical reforms to the health service are implemented, a new report has claimed.
The drastic overhaul of the health service will see the commissioning responsibilities handed over to GP consortia from strategic health authorities and primary care trusts, which will be axed.
The Nuffield Trust said that the new organisations emerging from the restructure will need to focus solely on managing the transition period. It added that if they try to take on too much work in their early stages, they would most likely come up against some serious challenges.
One of the demanding targets that have been imposed on the NHS by the government is to cut back £15bn to £20bn a year in ‘efficiency savings’.
Private management consultants have been recruited by GPs seeking advice on the government’s controversial reforms set to transform the NHS.
The changes to the health service will see the responsibility of commissioning transferred to GP consortia from strategic health authorities and primary care trusts, which will then be axed. This means that GPs will be responsible for the handling of around £80bn of the NHS budget.
More than two dozen GP consortia have been working with consultancy firm McKinsey in an attempt to get a better idea of how the new arrangements will work out.
The government seems committed to charging forward with NHS reforms and not having constructive dialogue despite the warnings of the British Medical Association and other organisations, writes Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GPs committee, in the latest edition of Public Service Review: Health and Social Care
The government has recently responded to its consultation on the health white paper for England ‘Liberating the NHS’, which was published in July 2010. The British Medical Association (BMA) waited with interest to see if the government would take our concerns, and those of many other organisations, on board. Unfortunately, we saw little evidence in the government’s response that it is genuinely prepared to engage with constructive criticism of its plans for the NHS.
The BMA’s consultation response set out its belief that the white paper is good in parts, bad in parts, and lacking detail in others. We emphasised doctors’ concerns about the potential damage that could be done by the continuation of the internal market in the NHS and plans to accelerate competition. In particular, the BMA is concerned by the insistence on there being ‘any willing provider’, which will mean many different providers competing for services. While choice has been proven to drive up standards in other industries, the NHS does not operate like a normal market. Generating more work may increase income and profit in other sectors, but the more the NHS does, the more it costs the taxpayer. Having many different providers competing to run services is wasteful, bureaucratic and inefficient, and these plans are coming at a time when the NHS is expected to find billions of pounds in efficiency savings.
Doctors are also concerned about what this will mean for services. For example, could collaboration between GPs and a group of specialists at the local hospital be seen as anti-competitive and, therefore, be stopped by the new health regulator? Patients would find this hard to understand, but that is the possibility when competition is seen as more important than collaboration.
The number of NHS patients who wait months for cancer and heart disease tests has shot up in the last year, according to Department of Health (DH) figures.
The figures show that in January 2010 there were 7,080 patients waiting longer than six weeks for diagnostic tests but 12 months later there were 11,363. Also, the number of patients waiting for heart scans tripled over the year, and the numbers waiting six weeks for MRI scans went up by 175 per cent.
However, the DH said: “The NHS undertakes millions of diagnostic tests every month and patients continue to receive timely access to these tests. It is not unusual to see seasonal variations in waiting times. Given the pressure seasonal flu and other winter bugs played, it is not surprising that more people will have waited until January before their diagnostic tests.”
The shadow health secretary John Healey told the Daily Telegraph: “This is further evidence of frontline pressures emerging in the NHS, as the government forces through a wasteful reorganisation of the internal bureaucracy.”
