“We are fed up of giving sub-standard and delayed care”
Doctors protest at Conservative party conference 2023
Thousands of doctors have gathered in Manchester outside the Tory Party conference to demand the government listen to their pay demands.
Around 2,000 doctors are expected to be at the national rally this Tuesday organised by the BMA union, with doctors travelling from across the country to join, including junior doctors, consultants and radiographers who are all on strike today.
Doctor Emma Runswick of the BMA said this morning that doctors were ‘fed up’ with giving sub-standard and delayed care to patients under the current conditions. She said doctors were in Manchester in the hope of talking to Tory delegates.
“We’ll be here literally on the doorstep, if they want to come and talk to us they can step outside and we will start negotiations today or tomorrow,” said Runswick.
“We’re hoping that we will be able to put some pressure on the government to resolve this dispute.”
BMA survey reveals breakdown of trust as junior doctors brace for biggest walkout in NHS history
People take part in a rally in Trafalgar Square in London, in support of striking NHS junior doctors, as the British Medical Association holds a 96-hour walkout in a dispute over pay. Picture date: Tuesday April 11, 2023.
THE loss of trust between doctors and Tory ministers is the “worst it has been for at least three decades,” the British Medical Association (BMA) has warned.
In a damning intervention ahead of the 75th birthday of the NHS on Wednesday, the union’s council chairman Dr Phil Banfield stressed that he has never known such a breakdown of trust in his 30 years as a medic.
It is an “absolute travesty” that doctors feel they have no other choice but to strike following more than a decade of plummeting take-home pay, he added.
The warning came as junior doctors prepare to stage the biggest walkout in the history of the health service between July 13 and 18.
Sunak met with the CEOs of several UK private health corporations in Number 10 in December. | No 10 Downing Street
Rishi Sunak hosted a meeting with seven bosses from the UK’s biggest private health companies to discuss how to tackle the NHS backlog, openDemocracy can reveal.
Campaigners have raised concerns that the close involvement of private healthcare corporations in the government’s response to the NHS crisis will benefit shareholders at the expense of public investment.
The government announced the creation of the Elective Recovery Taskforce in December to provide advice on how to “turbocharge NHS recovery from the pandemic, reduce waiting times for patients and eliminate waits for routine care of over a year by 2025”.
At the time, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) refused to give openDemocracy details of the group’s members, or say who had attended its launch at Number 10 led by the PM and health secretary Steve Barclay in December.
A guestlist for the event, obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request, reveals that half a dozen CEOs from private health firms were in attendance.
Guests included the chief execs of the UK’s two largest private hospital operators: Paolo Pieri, the chief exec of Circle Health Group, and Justin Ash, who heads up Spire Healthcare. Also present was Jim Easton, the chief executive of Practice Plus Group, the NHS’s top private healthcare provider.
They were joined by David Hare, the chief executive of Independent Healthcare Provider Network, a lobby group that represents for-profit and not-for-profit private health organisations including Bupa and HCA, one of the biggest healthcare facility companies in the US.
Private health tycoons have wined and dined senior ministers while cashing in on NHS contracts
The private healthcare executives, which also included CEOs from Horder Healthcare, Newmedica, InHealth and Medefer, outnumbered the five NHS England directors invited to the event.
DHSC said it could not provide openDemocracy with minutes from the meeting because none were taken, and refused to share any papers handed out to attendees.
Separately, the government quietly published a list of members of the Elective Recovery Taskforce on Monday. The 16-person group includes DHSC ministers, six NHS bosses, and Hare.
Other members include Bill Morgan, a private healthcare lobbyist whose past clients included Virgin Care, who was appointed a Number 10 adviser in November, and Paul Manning, an NHS consultant surgeon who is also chief medical officer for Circle Healthcare.
The government said the role of the task force would be to “shape proposals for how the healthcare system can make use of all resources at its disposal, further tackling the backlog caused by the Covid-19 pandemic”. It will conclude its work in March.
Last week, the prime minister said he had signed up to an NHS GP after the Guardian reported that he had registered with a private clinic in west London that charges £250 for a consultation.
Tony O’Sullivan, a retired consultant paediatrician and co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, told openDemocracy: “The head parasites are at the table to maximise future extraction of NHS funds.”
He added: “This is an important disclosure extracted from the government proving the direction of travel – to continue disinvesting in the NHS and increase its enforced dependence on private health care.
“The private sector was bailed out during Covid, has a lucrative four-year £10bn deal ongoing and is also in a position to earn massive profits from patients forced to go privately to avoid NHS queues of 7.2 million.”
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Medical body calls for ‘immediate action’ as Royal College of Emergency Medicine reiterates claims over deaths caused by care delays
The pressure on the NHS is “intolerable and unsustainable”, medics have said, amid warnings that the deaths of up to 500 people each week could be caused by delays in emergency care.
It comes after more than a dozen NHS trusts and ambulance services declared critical incidents over the festive period, with officials citing rising flu cases and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic among the reasons for the pressure on the health service.
Prof Phil Banfield, chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) council, hit out at both the prime minister and the health secretary. Highlighting the scale of the crisis facing healthcare workers, he called the government’s decision not to negotiate with medics a “political choice” that is leading to patients “dying unnecessarily”.
“The current situation in the NHS is intolerable and unsustainable, both for our patients and the hardworking staff desperately trying to keep up with incredibly high levels of demand,” he said.
that the Conservatives repeatedly claim not to impose reorganisations or privatisation on the NHS only to do exactly that. I suggest that we’ve learned that the Conservatives have absolutely no mandate to further privatise the NHS since Cameron and Lansley promised not to.
