NHS news summary: There appears to be a growing acceptance that Lansley’s bill will destroy the NHS and transform UK health care to the US model i.e. health care only for the rich. UK Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg claims that he will “front up” the issue with the Conservatives. I wonder what that means and why he had to be directed by his party before starting his front-upping. Many GPs intend to retire early to protect their pensions and more cuts.
Conservative election poster 2010
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.
Experts published research today detailing why the coalition’s controversial Health Bill means the end of the NHS.
The paper, by Professor Allyson Pollock and David Price of the Centre for Health Sciences at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, shows how Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s NHS assault will amount to the break-up of a universal, comprehensive, publicly accountable, tax-funded service that is free at the point of use.
The researchers say that the government is going against its duty to provide comprehensive care by abolishing the structures and mechanisms needed to do this.
Nick Clegg told a meeting of his MPs in Westminster on Tuesday that he would now be “taking the lead” within government to rein in its programme of reform for the NHS.
The Liberal Democrat leader said he was determined to ensure changes were made to the health and social care bill, the clearest sign that he will personally negotiate with the health secretary, Andrew Lansley. A senior party source said that the Lib Dem leader had decided to “front up” the issue with the Conservatives.
Lansley’s reforms to the NHS – handing over a majority of the healthcare budget to GPs for commissioning, and scrapping primary care trusts – have been opposed by some Conservative MPs and the British Medical Association, and 10 days ago Lib Dems voted at their spring party conference to ensure modifications were made to the bill. Then it was suggested that even though the Lib Dems had registered their discontent, there was little their leader would be able to do within government.
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.
I’m going to be there to defend the NHS. I’ll be with a very large group from Kingston hospital, where I work, and a couple of my grandchildren, and we’ll all be carrying two flipping heavy banners.
We feel the NHS is under attack. Before the last election, Nick Clegg and David Cameron used Kingston hospital as a backdrop to say that the NHS would be safe in their hands. But now the government has said the NHS must have £20bn worth of efficiency savings, despite maintaining that no frontline staff will be cut. And at Kingston we have been told that over the next four years we will be losing nearly 500 staff – 20% of whom are nurses and doctors. Now, if that ain’t frontline staff, then what is?
The hospital is saying that no services will be affected. Yeah, right. It is also saying there will be no redundancies. I half-believe that, because it could achieve staff reductions through people retiring. But it ain’t about redundancies: it’s about the service. You can’t run a hospital without the staff. At Kingston, we have 22 consultants, and 214 nurses and midwives. They’re not exactly sitting in the cupboard twiddling their thumbs.
NHS satisfaction levels have reached a record high among the public and employees, according to the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey.
The latest BSA survey found that 64 per cent of the British public were either very or quite satisfied with the NHS – representing the highest levels since the survey began in 1983.
The results coincided with findings from the 2010 annual NHS staff survey, which reported record levels of job satisfaction in the NHS. Three quarters said they were satisfied by the quality of work and patient care they delivered, while 90 per cent were happy with the difference they made to patients.
The government has shown that when it comes to pay in the NHS its prefers the smart Saville Row suit of the bankers to the uniform of a hard-working nurse.
Unite, the largest union in the country, said it verged on the grotesque that the NHS Pay Review Body (PRB) was marginalised by the government’s public sector pay freeze policy, while on the other hand, ministers allowed bankers’ bonuses to let rip at the 83 per cent state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
Unite national officer Rachael Maskell said today (Monday 21 March): ”It is quite clear who wields the influence in the corridors of Whitehall – the well-suited investment banker – and not hardworking public sector staff, who are being made to pay, through higher taxes and reduced living standards, for the financial crisis the banking elite created in the first place.
Patients in NHS hospitals are being fed cheaper food than prison inmates, it was revealed yesterday.
Spending on hospital food has been slashed by up to two-thirds over the last five years, according to official figures.
In some hospitals in England budgets have fallen by 62 per cent – with meals costing little more than £1. That’s just half the £2.10 spent on the average meal in jail.
Three Royal College of Nursing members handed a letter co-signed by nearly 23,000 members to 11 Downing Street, to express concerns about cuts to NHS frontline services.
Salma Bilkis, Lee Thomas and Kevin Takooree were joined by Janet Davies, the RCN’s Director of Nursing and Service Delivery, when they handed in the letter at the official residence of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.
The letter was handed in as Mr Osborne prepared to deliver his latest Budget. The UK is braced for massive cuts in public services, but the Coalition Government has said NHS spending is ring-fenced.
A Westcountry MP will today come face-to-face with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in the wake of claims that his reforms risk destroying the NHS.
Sarah Wollaston, GP-turned-Tory MP for Totnes, has warned that the Government is in danger of creating a “Trojan horse” that could undermine the NHS from within.
In outspoken remarks, Dr Wollaston said the controversial re-organisation risked changing the NHS “beyond recognition” and was “doomed to fail”.
A “no-fly zone” is another oxymoron, a total contradiction in terms. It means that Colonel Gaddafi’s “brutal, savage and unacceptable treatment”, has been replaced by our “brutal, savage and unacceptable treatment”, using depleted uranium (i.e., nuclear waste) weapons and blowing Libyan people to bits in their uncounted numbers. (“It is not productive” to count coalition deaths as US Generals, led by General Mark Kimmit, have reiterated.)
The region and peoples will become another Fallujah, with the yet-to-be-conceived, even, born with deformities, often making them unrecognisable as human infants. Headless, limbless, organs on the outside of the body, one cyclops eye, no eyes, no brain — a reality witnessed by the writer over many years.
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Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves on earth. As Iraq, and as the desire for the vital resources through Afghanistan, no one with half a brain believes your concern for humanity is the real reason. There were no calls from your Party, or the Conservatives, for “no fly zones” of any hue, or for restraint, in “Operation Cast Lead” (Christmas-New Year 2008-2009) as Israel bombarded the people of Gaza, caught, like “fish in a barrel”, to use a term about wanton slaughter, from another US General. That certainly looked like “brutal, savage and unacceptable” treatment, to most observers.
Last July, when you became acting Prime Minister when David Cameron was away, you said, in an exchange with Jack Straw, the previous Labour Foreign Secretary:
Perhaps one day you could account for your role in the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq.3
This is written on the eighth anniversary of the beginning of that illegal invasion. The invasion George W. Bush declared a “Crusade.” As you embark on the course of decimating another ancient Islamic land for oil – one with an even smaller population than Iraq – another “Crusade” to install another compliant puppet regime, I can only say shame on you all.
The Unions are promoting their anti-cuts March for an Alternative event next weekend. There will be a march topped with a rally at Hyde Park. There are rumours that Labour Party leader Ed Miliband will address the rally. It’s disappointing that the unions are still so subservient to the Labour Party after all these years.
Andrew Lansley and the Department of Health are accused of manipulating the presentation – spinning – of the proposed abolition of the NHS by supressing evidence that there is widespread satisfaction with the NHS.
The BMA have published an open letter after their special meeting called for the Destruction of the NHS bill to be withdrawn.
Conservative election poster 2010
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.
Union leaders are to target Liberal Democrats in a campaign to slow down the speed and scale of public spending cuts as the TUC prepares for the biggest protest yet against the coalition’s economic programme.
Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, hopes to exploit unrest in Lib Dem ranks to step up pressure on a party leadership which he believes is increasingly isolated from its activists.
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday before next weekend’s anti-cuts rally in central London, Mr Barber attacked the Lib Dems for abandoning their pre-election pledge to delay cuts until the economy was growing. Stressing that the campaign will be a “long haul”, he vowed to step up the political pressure on ministers and coalition MPs to “realise quite how out of touch they are with the wider public”.
Andrew Lansley is preparing himself for another bad week at the Department of Health after two new crises hit his plans for NHS reform.
The health secretary was accused of “burying good news” after reports emerged that his department sat on reports showing unprecedented satisfaction with the health service.
Meanwhile, a Tory MP and doctor laid into the reforms in the Daily Telegraph, saying they could change the NHS “beyond recognition”.
The developments follow a tough week for the health secretary, whose reforms have been criticised by health experts, unions, Labour MPs and some Tory backbenchers.
The NHS risks being changed beyond recognition by the Coalition’s health reforms, a Conservative doctor claimed yesterday.
Sarah Wollaston, MP for Totnes and a practising GP, branded the reorganisation a ‘Trojan horse’.
In the most scathing attack yet on the plans of Conservative Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, she said that key elements of the shake-up – the biggest in the Health Service’s 60-year history – were ‘doomed to fail’.
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I find the second featured article interesting. The article recognises the importance that Lansley was formerly Cameron’s boss and suggests that Cameron was not interested or aware of the extent of Lansley’s ‘reforms’.
In a related exercise, I have been trying to nail down the origin of this movement to destroy the NHS. I suspect that it may be criticism of the National Health Service by American politicians in 2008 / 2009. These criticisms were made in response to Hillary Clinton’s manouvers concerning health care reform for the poor. Clinton’s proposals were only ever posturings – there was never any serious intentions.
It is disappointing that UK Neo-Cons suck up so much to their insane US masters. USUK.
Conservative election poster 2010
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.
CAMPAIGNERS will today hand over a petition signed by more than 150,000 people to MP John Pugh opposing plans to radically reform the NHS.
Members of campaign group 38 Degrees will tell the Lib Dem health spokesman of the dangers of the proposed Health and Social Bill.
The proposed Coalition legislation will hand 80% of the NHS budget to consortia of GPs, who will buy services from providers in the public, private and charity sectors.
But there are fears that NHS hospitals will go bust if private firms grab large chunks of their revenue by cherry-picking the easiest treatments.
The great NHS storm that has beset politics was one that few saw coming. There were voices, and I hope a touch of self-congratulation on the part of the Guardian might be forgiven here, who warned before the election that Andrew Lansley was quietly drawing up plans that might explode the moment they met daylight. And so it has come to pass.
In part, of course, the calm before the storm arose because of what the Conservatives did not say. Lansley’s shock therapy was referred to in only the most oblique terms in the Tory manifesto, while the coalition agreement described an entirely different package, which involved democratising primary care trusts instead of abolishing them. In part, however, it has to do with the measured personal style of Lansley himself.
A former civil servant, who in the distant past worked for Norman Tebbit, he retains something of the mandarin’s technocratic manner. That is only reinforced by his extraordinary tenure over the health portfolio, which has been in his grasp since Iain Duncan Smith’s day, some seven years ago. Sure of his terrain, he avoided all the obvious elephant traps on the cusp of the 2010 election, and he made the shrewd choice to hug the doctors close, even querying Gordon Brown’s plans to extend GP opening hours, to ensure that the trusted voice of the profession would not rail against him in opposition.
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The reaction against the health bill is rapidly moving from silent to violent, as the world wakes up to what it will mean. After those air-brushed election posters about “cutting the deficit, not the NHS” David Cameron’s personal reputation is very much at risk. Only when the memoirs are written will we discover whether he ever intended to allow the mild-mannered Lansley to gamble with a service that he once described as “a wonderful fact of British life”.
The founding principles of the NHS are in danger of being wiped out by Government plans to overhaul the health service, an MP has warned.
Oldham East and Saddleworth MP Debbie Abrahams said the health reforms had no mandate from the British people and no support from health professionals nor the Lib-Dems who are in coalition with the Tories.
Mrs Abrahams said: “Not only are the founding principles of the NHS in danger of being wiped out, but its culture — the reason that most of its employees work for the NHS — will go as well.
“The whole ethos of the NHS will change. It will now be driven by competition and consumer interests.”
Health union Unison warned today against the government’s vicious local authority spending cuts following evidence that the NHS will be forced to pick up the pieces of a £1 billion gap in social care funding.
Health think tank the King’s Fund revealed that the NHS will come under increasing pressure from people whose needs are not met by local authority services.
The fund warned that local authority social care services face a funding gap in excess of at least £1.2bn by 2014-15.
Paul Blomfield MP yesterday attacked the Tory/Lib Dem government’s plans to drastically restructure the NHS which he warned will create a two-tier health system, and encourage the privatisation of the NHS. Mr Blomfield urged the Government to abandon their NHS plans and listen to the British Medical Association who at an emergency conference on Tuesday urged the Government to think again.
Paul Blomfield MP said in his speech that: “The proposals reveal the ideological heart of the Government and their vision for public services: a two-tier health system, with the best available for those who can afford it, and the NHS becoming a safety net for those who cannot.”
Speaking after the debate Paul said: “I’m very disappointed that Lib Dem MPs failed to support Labour in defending the NHS from the Tory attack on it. The Lib Dem MPs have ignored the vote at their conference in Sheffield last weekend which rejected the NHS reforms and they’ve let down their voters.
Earlier this week Labour launched a petition calling on David Cameron to protect frontline services in the NHS and keep his pre-General Election promise to put an end to big top down reorganisations. Labour secured an opposition day debate on Tory plans to reorganise the NHS after the plans were rejected by the Liberal Democrats at their Spring Conference and condemned by the British Medical Association at their extraordinary general meeting last week.
John Denham, Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, said: “GPs don’t want the Tories’ NHS reforms, Lib Dems don’t want the Tories and the public don’t want the Tories’ NHS reforms. We beat the Government on the forests and I know we can beat them on the NHS reforms if we all work together.”
John Healey, Shadow Health Secretary, added: “David Cameron has scrapped Labour’s waiting time guarantees for hospital treatments and GP appointments, and he’s cutting frontline staff while wasting £2billion on a reckless reorganisation.
The guide to the “unprecedented” restructuring of the health service in England points out that previous reforms had a “negative effect” on services, staff morale and productivity.
It claims that “quality of care provided to patients” and “continuity of services” is in danger as tiers of management are removed and experience staff leave.
And the paper, signed by senior civil servants including the Chief Executive of the NHS, reminds staff that the Government’s reforms are taking place at the same time as £20billion in efficiency savings must be made.
The threatened NHS has been much in all our minds this week, and, pestered by online petitions and appeals for support, I’ve been going over my long relationship with it. Our experiences of the NHS are woven deeply into the fabric of our lives, and most of mine have been good. All my children were born and cared for on the NHS, and have been well served by it. And for those nearing the end of life, my GP used to bake and ice a cake for each of his patients who reached the age of 100.
It has been a recurrent theme in my fiction, as it has been an integral part of my life. The narrator of The Millstone (1966), a young unmarried mother, in a central confrontational scene, actually delivers herself of the line “I love the National Health Service”, while insisting on access to her sick baby in Great Ormond Street hospital. How things have changed since then, and sometimes for the better. When I went to visit my granddaughter a few years ago, as she recovered from minor surgery, the atmosphere was festive. Our generation of mothers had complained, we had made ourselves heard, and life on the wards had improved. That’s how it worked, and should work. It is for us, it is ours, and the professionals do listen.
And now we seem to be on the brink of losing all of this. It isn’t wholly unexpected. I predicted creeping privatisation in my 1996 satirical condition-of-England novel, The Witch of Exmoor, written at the somewhat ridiculous and squalid end of the failing Major government. We had already become wary about the selling off of public assets and services into private hands – gas, water, prisons, railways. One of the novel’s more sympathetic characters, an advertising man, works for a firm which is given the task of updating “the corporate image of the National Health Service”.
