Fragmentation of health service goes ahead

Published: 29 September, 2011

• EVERYTHING went quiet over the summer, when the government surprisingly instituted its “listening pause” on the proposed National Health Service bill, because of widespread opposition to its direction and planned privatisations.

They did not listen but used the time (when not on holiday) to promote their ideas and values.

No matter what happens on October 11, when the bill returns to the House of Lords for the final time, our healthcare is going to cost us a lot more, whether through taxation, individual payments for prescriptions and services of all kinds – or both!

The medical and nursing professions have now realised that the NHS is threatened with the sort of fragmentation which will be very hard to mend. They are being hit by redundancies and general chaos while the changes (which have already started) are implemented.

I think people find it very hard to believe what is happening.

The NHS has for so long been a dependable and central part of our society.

Trust in government promises to protect the NHS led people to believe that genuine safeguards and improvements to the bill would be made as a result of the so-called consultations of summer.

The press has served us very badly and only recently given much critical coverage to the changes proposed.

So the debate started very late. Now the health secretary will no longer have responsibility for providing healthcare from “cradle to grave”, as Aneurin Bevan promised in 1948.

This attacks the unified concept of the health service, which has developed by slow and careful stages over many years.

Changes could surely have been implemented without bringing in numerous private companies with a very different approach to the business of health.

Many of these companies, which are eagerly awaiting new profits, are foreign and without the social commitment that permeates our health service (workers and patients).

It is inevitable that shareholders of the private companies, so keen to participate in the NHS and benefit from its reputation, will press for higher and higher dividends (which will come out of the total health budget and therefore reduce funds available to other parts of the service.

Hospitals and practices that are squeezed for cash will be easier to close, on the basis that they can’t manage their budgets adequately – like London’s out-of-hours service, which was closed precipitately.

GP practices can be passed on to other companies when it suits the original “owner”, with no accountability or inspection, as has already happened in Camden (United Health wasn’t making enough profit and it was quite honest about this).

Everybody should be protesting loudly at these attacks, before it is too late.

SHEILA PATTON
Spencer Rise, NW5

Are you reassured?

• IF there are any voters in Camden who feel reassured after the Liberal Democrats’ amendments to the NHS bill, I suggest they take a good look at the full-page advertisement placed by Casualty First (New Journal, September 22), see above detail.

Need I say more?

GRAHAM BINMORE, Highgate Road, NW5