Defend the NHS – now!

Published: 18 November, 2010

• AT a meeting in Camden Town Hall, organised by Keep Our NHS Public (KONP), I heard with sinking heart about the white paper that threatens every aspect of our health service. 

Its full title is White Paper on Health, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS: a fine example of its spin-speak. One after another, six speakers working at the heart of the NHS translated its vaguely optimistic directives into future realities for the health service. All confirmed the same story. They revealed nothing less than the destruction of the present system, to be replaced by “the market” which has just failed globally.

We heard Jacky Davis, co-chair NHS Consultants’ Association, explain that all hospitals will be forced to become foundation trusts in three years. This means that institutes created to care for the sick will become competing autonomous businesses whose function will be to make profits. Where an area is not profitable – as in, for instance, the treatment of pain – the funds will be cut. 

The cap on private patients is to be lifted and they will go to the front of the queue, boldly asserting the two-tier NHS. 

Pressure will be exerted to drive care from hospitals into the community. Thousands of beds and staff will go. Hospitals that can’t pay their way will be closed down. 

Yes – gone. 

Spelling out the double whammy of massive cuts and huge reorganisation, Ms Davis added that before David Cameron was elected he said there would be no unnecessary changes. Doctors, she affirmed, don’t want these changes. Patients don’t want them. With my own ears I heard a senior hospital consultant insist that the white paper has no legitimacy and no mandate, and we must follow the students and take to the streets to oppose these cuts. I believe her.

Louise Irvine, a Lewisham GP, explained how 500 to 600 GP consortia will be formed to buy secondary care for patients, also midwives and other services, replacing the present structure. Most GPs aren’t trained and won’t have time to “commission” services so will have to use managers – further expense and cost-watching. 

Co-operation and collaboration with NHS services, on which our present system is based, will be seen as anti-competitive and will be heavily penalised! Why are “they” doing this? Because by controlling GPs’ clinical decisions they will be controlling costs. GPs will be policed by their own colleagues. Divide and rule.

Almost casually the true effects of the cuts trickle down, each already a scandal. One-third of all mental health beds are being “lost”. A cancer ward to close at Bart’s hospital. UCH cancer patients now supervised by cancer nurses being transferred to GP nurses who have no special training… 

The white paper is not just trying to make us, the public, pay for the bankers’ crisis. It’s a comprehensive ideological onslaught on the NHS. Like most people, I didn’t know it was happening. The unions’ mass meeting announced for next March is way too late – the white paper will be debated this autumn and then its general points quickly turned into policy. The millionaires’ cabinet must be made to understand this is their poll tax moment. If Lib Dems have any principles left to stand up for they should resign en masse. 

The campaign to save Whittington Hospital’s A&E department was successful. This is a far greater challenge. KONP urges you and me to raise funds, lobby MPs (especially marginals), and make GPs especially understand that this is not a done deal. 

Need motivation? Try contrasting the cheeseparing on cancer care (see above) with this week’s morning radio news item that bankers’ associations are “trying to persuade” the banks to reduce their £7billion bonus payouts this year to a mere £4billion. 

Where is the fairer world that was finally awarded to our parents and grandparents in 1945; don’t we deserve it now? 

ANNE BOSTON
Inkerman Road, NW5