We can’t afford to make NHS more expensive

Published: 25th March 2010

• WHILE our attention has been focused on the protecting Whittington Hospital’s A&E unit,  a further development threatens to undermine emergency provision in our local NHS.
The primary care trust are planning to put the out-of-hours service, currently run by a collective of GPs, out for tender.
The public may ask why this is such a bad thing. First, the specifications are vague allowing the possibility of a proposal, for example, to use nurses in a large number of cases instead of doctors.
This will mean that residents would not have the opportunity to go to a hospital A&E unit or to see a doctor through the out-of-hours service.
Though nurses may well be able to deal with some issues, we all know how easy it is for a serious illness to be missed and the public needs to be entitled to see the best trained professionals other than in very minor cases. 
Secondly, as a result of tendering out the service, we expect private health companies will take over the service as they have done with the GP practices in the south of the borough.
They have the capacity to engage in these time-consuming, and in our view often time-wasting, tendering processes as well as to undercut others.
But as the experience of countries like the USA and even Germany have shown such privately run services are in the end much more expensive and healthcare corporations seek to avoid paying for anything they are not forced to provide.
These corporations not only have to pay salaries, but they have to pay shareholder profits, executive fat cut salaries, advertising costs and much more.
They don’t have the public service ethos of most of our GPs and are disconnected from communities.
There is no legal reason why the PCT needs to tender out these services. It should not  do so. We cannot afford to be making our NHS more expensive in the difficult era ahead of us.
Unfortunately the three largest political parties do not seem particularly concerned about commercialisation and privatisation of our health service. 
Camden’s excellent Keep the NHS Public campaign group, which we strongly support, are however working strongly on this matter and Green councillors are fully behind them.
They are seeking to take this issue up through Camden’s health scrutiny committee with ministers.
I would urge residents who are concerned about this insidious privatisation to communicate this to their councillors and MPs and request proper engagement with the public as to changes to the NHS locally.
CLLR ALEX GOODMAN
Leader of Green Party Group