The notable NHS news in the past hour os so is that the Bristish Medical Association (BMA) has called on the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to withdraw the bill that destroys the NHS.
Doctors have voted in favour of calling on the Government to scrap its plans for overhauling the NHS.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is coming under increasing pressure over his reforms, which would see more than 150 organisations abolished and 80% of the NHS budget pass into the hands of GPs.
Some doctors support the content of the Health and Social Care Bill, currently going through Parliament, but many have been voicing opposition to parts of it, including increasing the role of private companies in delivering healthcare.
The British Medical Association (BMA) held an emergency meeting on Tuesday attended by almost 400 doctors to debate the plans.
Doctors voted in favour of calling on Mr Lansley to withdraw the Bill entirely and for a “halt to the proposed top-down reorganisation of the NHS”. They said the Government should accept there was “no electoral mandate” for the plans which were not part of the election manifesto of either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats.
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.
YORK lives will be put at risk if children’s heart surgery services are moved from Leeds, a top paediatric doctor has warned.
Dr Robin Ball, of York Hospital, said NHS proposals to move the heart surgery to Newcastle would be a “major problem” for the children of York and said it would put stress on hospital transport services.
He said York currently sends about ten extreme emergency cases a year to Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) for surgery as well as referring a “significant number” of the estimated 250 child heart cases which are seen in York each year.
DOCTORS in Buckinghamshire are set to deliver a stinging attack on the health secretary Andrew Lansley – saying he has reneged on a pre-election promise and is ‘unfit’ to run the NHS.
The Bucks division of the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, is expected to join other regions in calling for Lansley to resign at a meeting today.
A motion from Bucks doctors set to be debated says Lansley has “reneged on his pre-election promise not to reorganise the NHS management structures”, while “demonstrating his desire to destroy the public’s trust in their GPs”.
The government will not back down on its plans to introduce large-scale reforms to the NHS, Downing Street has maintained.
Members of the Liberal Democrats used the opportunity of their party’s spring conference to express their concerns with the plans laid out by David Cameron, voting against what they believe to be a potentially damaging programme of reforms.
However, despite this emergent split within the ruling coalition, Number 10 has insisted that, while proposals such as axing primary care trusts may ultimately be amended when they are placed before parliament, the government will not be performing a u-turn anytime soon.
A short statement released by Mr Cameron’s official spokesman on the back of the weekend conference said: “There are not about to be significant changes to the policy.”
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is facing the biggest revolt yet from doctors over his plans to shake up the NHS.
The British Medical Association (BMA) will vote on three separate motions of no confidence in Mr Lansley later.
Doctors are meeting in central London at the BMA’s first special representative meeting in 19 years.
The hastily-arranged summit is a sign of how much anger the Government’s plans to give more power to GPs and introduce more private competition into the NHS have provoked.
Opening the BMA special representative meeting in London today, Dr Hamish Meldrum said representatives must use the ‘opportunity wisely’.
He warned that most commentators say it is ‘unlikely’ the government will ‘buckle and withdraw the Bill’.
He said: ‘What we have to decide today is how to move on from here, how we are most likely to achieve change, how we support our colleagues – and yes, how we best defend our NHS.
‘Whatever we do today we must remember that, above all, we are medical professionals. We must search for the best outcomes for our patients as well as the profession, even in the most difficult situations.’
Mr Lansley was facing a potentially embarrassing day as the British Medical Association (BMA) debates a series of motions that are highly critical of the Government’s health reforms.
It is the first special representative meeting in 19 years – a measure of how angry many doctors are over plans to give more power to GPs and introduce more private competition into the NHS.
The Health and Social Care Bill, currently going through Parliament, would also see more than 150 organisations scrapped.
The BMA delegates voted in favour of calling on Mr Lansley to put a “halt to the proposed top-down reorganisation of the NHS”.
The BMA is to call on health secretary Andrew Lansley to withdraw the Health and Social Care Bill, after representatives ignored warnings by their leader that it would be impractical.
In the first significant policy move at today’s Special Representative Meeting, a motion was passed calling on the Government to ‘call a halt to the proposed top down reoganisation of the NHS’.
Representives voted overhwelmingly for the legislation to be withdrawn and called on the Government to ‘consider and act on the criticisms and advice from the medical profession.’
The vote, which causede a split between council members and grassroots representatives, showed how divided the BMA is over how it should respond to the health bill, with BMA chair Dr Hamish Meldrum having earlier warned representatives not to ‘tie the hands’ of negotiators.
Welcome to this SRM – your opportunity, together, to help shape the difficult decisions that the BMA needs to make in the face of potentially the biggest reorganisation the NHS in England has faced in its 63 years.
The decisions you make today will have a profound effect on your profession, your patients and the future shape of our NHS.
The Government’s proposed reforms have far-reaching and potentially irreversible consequences for how the NHS is run and the way we deliver care to our patients.
This is your opportunity to scrutinise the proposals, to consider their impact, and ultimately to decide how best to influence the direction of health policy in England.
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.
The government’s plans for a health service shakeup face a radical overhaul after the Liberal Democrat leadership was forced to bow to the strength of a grassroots rebellion fuelled by fear of privatisation and an undue emphasis on competition.
The Lib Dems voted almost unanimously at the party’s spring conference in Sheffield to give councillors a central role in GP commissioning and in scrutinising foundation trusts. They called for a ban on all cherry-picking by private companies offering treatment services.
David Cameron will hold talks this week with his deputy, Nick Clegg, to decide whether the rebellion provides an opportunity to make changes to a health and social care bill that has become increasingly unpopular. Cameron acknowledges the government has not got his message across on health.
Reform backs DoH plans to reorganise the NHS. But it says the proposals neither provide accountability to patients nor dismantle central regulation.
Reorganising the commissioning structure would leave responsibility divided between consortia, local authorities and the NHS Commissioning Board, according to Reform’s report.
‘The Health Bill gives the NHS Commissioning Board significant powers over consortia,’ the report says. ‘But it also gives the secretary of state power to direct the Board not only in what it does but in how it does it. Consequently accountability runs to the centre.’
Anti-cuts campaigners are planning a wave of sit-ins, occupations and “people’s assemblies” to coincide with this month’s TUC demonstration, in a “carnival of civil disobedience” designed to highlight opposition to the government’s programme of cuts.
Student activists, tax avoidance campaigners and anti-capitalist groups say they plan to occupy some of the capital’s “great buildings”, close down scores of high street stores and stage a 24-hour occupation of Hyde Park.
“This is going to be a really important day,” said Anna Walker of the campaign group UK Uncut. “We had the student protests and we have seen the growth of UK Uncut, but this is the first time we are going to have people from all over the UK together whose lives are being turned upside down by these cuts. It is going to be the start of something powerful.”
Just hours after Party activists voted against the reforms, the Deputy Prime Minister insisted the Coalition was not trying to privatise the health service.
The plans will let market forces run riot in the NHS and senior Lib Dems fear it will inflict more damage on them than the broken tuition fees promise.
But, speaking at the spring conference yesterday, Mr Clegg said: “What I need you to know is all of us in Government are listening and that we take those concerns seriously.”
Spring Conference 2011: Lines 6-15 deleted, Amendments 1 and 2 carried, Main motion carried as amended.
Twelve conference representatives
Mover: Paul Burstow
Summation: Cllr Richard Kemp
Conference believes that the NHS is an integral part of a liberal society, reflecting the social solidarity of shared access to collective healthcare, and a shared responsibility to use resources effectively to deliver better health.
Conference welcomes our Coalition Government’s commitment to the founding principles of the NHS: available to all, free at the point of use, and based on need, not the ability to pay.
Conference welcomes much of the vision for the NHS set out in the Government’s White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS which commits the Government to an NHS that:
i) Is genuinely centred on patients and carers.
ii) Achieves quality and outcomes that are among the best in the world.
iii) Refuses to tolerate unsafe and substandard care.
iv) Puts clinicians in the driving seat and sets hospitals and providers free to innovate, with stronger incentives to adopt best practice.
v) Is more transparent, with clearer accountabilities for quality and results.
vi) Is more efficient and dynamic, with a radically smaller national, regional and local bureaucracy.
vii) Gives citizens a greater say in how the NHS is run.
Conference particularly welcomes the proposals to introduce real democratic legitimacy and local accountability into the NHS for the first time in almost forty years by:
a) Extending the powers of local authorities to enable effective scrutiny of any provider of any taxpayer funded health services.
b) Giving local authorities the role of leading on improving the strategic coordination of commissioning across the NHS, social care, and related childrens’ and public health services through councillor led Health and Wellbeing Boards.
c) Creating Health Watch to act as a local consumer champion for patients and to ensure that local patients are heard on a national level.
d) Returning public health duty to local government by ensuring that the majority of public health services will now be commissioned by Local Authorities from their ring-fenced public health budget.
Conference recognises however that all of the above policies and aspirations can be achieved without adopting the damaging and unjustified market-based approach that is proposed.
Conference regrets that some of the proposed reforms have never been Liberal Democrat policy, did not feature in our manifesto or in the agreed Coalition Programme, which instead called for an end to large-scale top-down reorganisations.
Conference therefore calls on Liberal Democrats in Parliament to amend the Health Bill to provide for:
I) More democratically accountable commissioning.
II) A much greater degree of co-terminously between local authorities and commissioning areas.
III) No decision about the spending of NHS funds to be made in private and without proper consultation, as can take place by the proposed GP consortia.
IV) The complete ruling out of any competition based on price to prevent loss-leading corporate providers under-cutting NHS tariffs, and to ensure that healthcare providers ‘compete’ on quality of care.
V) New private providers to be allowed only where there is no risk of ‘cherry picking’ which would destabilise or undermine the existing NHS service relied upon for emergencies and complex cases, and where the needs of equity, research and training are met.
VI) NHS commissioning being retained as a public function in full compliance with the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information laws, using the skills and experience of existing NHS staff rather than the sub-contracting of commissioning to private companies.
VII) The continued separation of the commissioning and provision of services to prevent conflicts of interests.
VIII) An NHS, responsive to patients’ needs, based on co-operation rather than competition, and which promotes quality and equity not the market.
Conferences calls:
1. On the Government to uphold the NHS Constitution and publish an audit of how well organisations are living by its letter and spirit.
2. On Liberal Democrats in local government to establish local Health and Wellbeing Boards and make progress developing the new collaborative ways of working necessary to provide joined up services that are personalised and local.
3. The government to seize fully the opportunity to reverse the scandalous lack of accountability of publicly-funded local health services which has grown up under decades of Conservative and Labour governments, by:
a) Ensuring full scrutiny, including the power to require attendance, by elected local authorities of all organisations in the local health economy funded by public money, including Foundation Trusts and any external support for commissioning consortia; ensuring that all such organisations are subject to Freedom of Information requirements.
b) Ensuring Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs) are a strong voice for accountable local people in setting the strategic direction for and co-ordinating provision of health and social care services locally by containing substantial representation from elected local councillors; and by requiring GP Commissioning Boards to construct their Annual Plans in conjunction with the HWBs; to monitor their implementation at meetings with the HWBs not less than once each quarter; and to review the implementation of the Annual Plan with the HWBs at the end of the year prior to the construction of the Annual Plan for the forthcoming year.
c) Ensuring commissioning of health services has some degree of accountability by requiring about half of the members of the board of commissioning consortia, alongside GPs, to be local councillors appointed as non-executive directors.
d) Offering additional freedoms only to Foundation Trusts that successfully engage substantial proportions of their local populations as active members.
Controversial proposals to reform the National Health Service in England has become the first public split on policy between the two coalition parties, after the Liberal Democrat spring conference voted overwhelmingly in favour of an extensive rewrite of the bill.
While there have been numerous backbench revolts on certain issues, such as tuition fees, and areas in which the parties have codified their disagreement, such as voting reform, this is the first public division on policy.
Nick Clegg, who said yesterday he was “very relaxed and very positive” about the NHS debate, narrowly averted defeat by accepting two “rebel” amendments when it became obvious that they were going to pass.
The issue of the health service was expected to expose divisions within the coalition when it was debated in Sheffield on Saturday – and that proved to be the case.
Well respected party figures, including Baroness Williams and Andrew George MP, spoke out against the government’s plan for a radical reform of GP services in the NHS.
Ex-MP Evan Harris put forward a motion that called for a change to the ‘damaging and unjustified market-based approach’ to reform of the NHS that has ‘never been Liberal Democrat policy, did not feature in our manifesto or in the agreed Coalition Programme, which instead called for an end to large-scale top-down reorganisations’.
There are not many 80-year-old politicians who can make their parties stop, think and change direction. But Shirley Williams is one of them. The former education secretary and co-founder of the SDP walks with a bit of a stoop these days. But intellectually she remains a towering figure at the height of her powers. In terms of influence within the Liberal Democrat party, few can match her. Among older friends and colleagues, she is known simply as “Shirl the Pearl” – a term that carries with it affection and also huge respect.
When we meet in a Sheffield hotel, during the Lib Dem spring conference, she is carrying a large bundle of papers, including letters from doctors and nurses who share her concerns about the coalition’s plans to reform the NHS.
She picks out one. “It is from a doctor. He says: ‘I didn’t think I was voting Liberal Democrat to see the Liberal Democrats supporting Conservative policies. At least you must maintain your identity.’ I think that is a perfectly fair point.”
Liberal Democrats have overwhelmingly voted to oppose NHS reforms in Sheffield after 5,000 activists rallied on the city’s streets in protest against the privitisation of the health service.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was facing the music today after Lib Dems voted to opppose controversial NHS reforms at their party conference at Sheffield City Hall on Saturday.
Thousands of angry protesters stormed the streets to hit back against the cuts that are being meted out in the coalition’s name, including increased tuition fees and the controversial Health and Social Reform Bill that demonstrators argue will privatise the NHS.
It is 19 years since the British Medical Association last thought it necessary to call a crisis meeting of its members in response to upheaval in the NHS. On that occasion, 26 March 1992, representatives of doctors across Britain debated John Major’s attempt to reform the NHS by separating the purchasers of healthcare from the providers. On Tuesday a special representative meeting will take place again – this time to consider its position in relation to Andrew Lansley’s plan to take the internal market of that era several stages further and prepare the NHS for privatisation.
Lansley has a problem; few of the BMA’s 140,000 members believe his plans are sensible or will deliver what he claims. The British Medical Journal has dubbed the reforms “Dr Lansley’s Monster”, the National Audit Office has warned that the quality of service offered by GPs could drop, and the King’s Fund has pointed out the government runs the risk of replacing the bureaucracy of performance management with the red tape of economic regulation.
This mother of all reforms plans to further extend the healthcare market within the health service in England, fronted by GPs, herded en masse into commissioning consortiums. They will be given £80bn of public funds to buy healthcare from a system of competing providers under an “any willing provider” policy that will see private hospitals able to provide NHS care.
More than 500 people demonstrated in East London last week against proposed cuts to the National Health Service (NHS). Protesters, including many medical staff, marched from the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The march met with warm support from local residents and traders in the residential areas of Whitechapel.
As well as the London Chest Hospital, the two hospitals are part of the Barts and the London NHS Trust. Along with the chest specialism, the Trust is also a London-wide specialist centre for head trauma treatment. The Trust last month announced plans to cut its workforce by 10 percent. It said it was making the cuts in order to meet efficiency savings of £20 billion demanded by the government by 2014-15.
The Trust has claimed that these cuts will mainly be to corporate and back-office posts, but they will directly affect patient care. Of the 630 proposed job losses, 250 are nursing posts. Consultants’ hours will be cut, and 100 in-patient beds lost. Unions point out that cutting administrative staff also results in an increased workload for nurses.
The protests were against cuts across the NHS as a whole. As the march passed through the financial districts of the City of London, largely empty at that time of night, anger was directed at the premises of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Deutsche Bank, and Vodafone. Under a deal with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Vodafone was able to avoid some £6 billion in taxes. RBS is 84 percent publicly-owned, following a £45 billion government bailout. On the same day that the protest took place it was revealed that ten senior executives at RBS are to share a bonus of up to £28 million.
Reform backs DoH plans to reorganise the NHS. But it says the proposals neither provide accountability to patients nor dismantle central regulation.
Reorganising the commissioning structure would leave responsibility divided between consortia, local authorities and the NHS Commissioning Board, according to Reform’s report.
‘The Health Bill gives the NHS Commissioning Board significant powers over consortia,’ the report says. ‘But it also gives the secretary of state power to direct the Board not only in what it does but in how it does it. Consequently accountability runs to the centre.’
Reform is also concerned about how well NHS workers understand the changes.
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.”
