Warning: Don’t get old or sick

Published: 17 June, 2010

• WE now know from local and national sources that the NHS is going to experience major cut-backs, not least in so-called “low priority treatments”: scores of operations will not be routinely funded.

These include those operations which allow many older people to keep going in their own homes – just what care in the community is supposed to embrace.

Without that crucial hip or knee operation or cataracts treated to remove the threat of blindness, many older people will not be able to look after themselves at home.

Although these operations are not yet on the official list it looks very likely that they will be next.

If “clinical or cost effectiveness is deemed limited”, the patient will not be entitled to have the operation.  

Moreover budgets will have to be managed by consortia of GP practices and, while some people might welcome that, it is going to place extra administrative burdens on GP practices with a major organisational shake-up following the imminent abolition of primary care trusts.

The NHS will only survive if the public manage to reverse these decisions.

DEIRDRE KRYMER
Vice-chair, Camden LINk