By Carla Turner
Approaching a year since the Health and Social Care bill passed through Parliament, Carla Turner looks at the damage already done, what’s still to come and whether recent protests against local cuts can form the basis for a national campaign to save our NHS
In 1948, the Labour government nationalised health services, laying the basis for a comprehensive system free at the point of use. Now, 65 years later, we are battling to keep what remains of the National Health Service in public hands.
The NHS is being forced to make “savings” of £20 billion. Hospitals are being forced to cut frontline services, to pay through the nose for Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes. For-profit health companies such as Virgin Care have already bought up some local services, while plans are underway to privatise ambulance services.
The attacks come in various forms, from prioritising private over NHS patients to cutting pensions and labour costs in preparation for privatisation, but they all boil down to the same thing – reducing healthcare availability for all who can’t afford to go private.
It is private companies like Virgin Care, Serco and Care UK who are bidding for slices of our health service, and the only thing on their minds is the bottom line. Virgin Care now runs 358 General Practices. Since it took over Kings Heath in Northampton, NHS patients have had to wait up to three weeks for an appointment, three GPs have been reduced to one and three nurses down to one part-timer, all so that Richard Branson can add more millions to his bank account.
However GP’s surgeries are not the only services being privatised. Perhaps the biggest sell-off is in community health, with local NHS bodies being instructed to put out to tender 39 services, from autism care to wheelchair provision. A lot of community services are for the elderly, who the government and NHS bureaucrats believe are easy targets.
But even our children aren’t safe from the Tory millionaires – many of them with direct or indirect personal links to the private health sector. The government has been trying to shut down child heart surgery units in Leeds, Leicester and Royal Brompton. Ministers claim the units are being closed to ensure better treatment at the hospitals still open, but why not invest to improve provision at all hospitals?
Cuts
Nationally we are also seeing massive cuts to services for under-16s with a third of neo-natal units in England reducing their number of nurses. Bliss charity chief executive, Andy Cole, warned: “The lives of England’s sickest babies are at risk by needless cuts to the neonatal nursing workforce.” Huge numbers of midwives’ jobs are also being cut despite the Royal College of Nursing saying that the NHS desperately needs more.
These cases demonstrate exactly what the Tories think of the NHS. A health service bought and paid for over six decades by working people is being broken up and sold off wholesale with no regard for the consequences.
The Mid-Staffordshire Hospital scandal, where budget cuts were placed above patient’s needs, exposed the government’s lack of investment and carefree attitude to standards. Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals Trust in Berkshire, for example, is considering closing or reducing services to pay down its £10 million debt. That could see services such as surgery, orthopaedics, scanning and children’s services cut or closed.
Many patients are complaining that GPs are refusing to issue them with medication because it is no longer within their budget. Yet if they were in a foundation trust which had made cuts in other places, say by reducing doctors or nurses, then it’s possible their drugs would still be available. This is the postcode lottery, which will see the quality of healthcare provision impact on housing costs, driving low-income families into areas with worse coverage.
Trusts face crippling debts under legacy of PFI. Last July Andrew Lansley picked “special administrator” Matthew Kershaw deal with South London Health Trust’s unsustainable PFI debts. He recommended that Lewisham should merge with Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, despite the fact it has no connection to SLHT. This means the closure of Lewisham’s £12 million newly furbished Accident & Emergency department, cuts to its maternity services and two-thirds of its buildings being sold off. This caused huge outrage. Residents, hospital workers, community groups and MPs have come together to form the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign. Mobilising tens of thousands with petitions and public meetings, the campaign held demonstrations in November and January.
Debates have taken place within the campaign as to whether industrial action should be supported or encouraged. One worker at the hospital said: “Strike action in an A&E is difficult and staff know that, but that’s not to say strike action isn’t appropriate in other departments.”
Further north at hospitals in Mid Yorkshire, medical secretaries and receptionists, so-called “back office staff”, have taken strike action against another pay cut. The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs hospitals in Wakefield, Dewsbury and Pontefract, has to save £24m by April 2013, and due to this over 70 members were sent redundancy letters and other employees face pay cuts of between £1,700 and £2,500 per annum. They may not be doctors or nurses, but they’re still essential to the running of the NHS, sorting out appointments, paperwork and other clerical tasks that can’t just be offloaded onto nurses or untrained agency workers.
Thousands of nursing jobs are disappearing as hospital trusts shrink their workforces to cut costs. Some hospital trusts are shedding as many as 300 nursing jobs over the next few years. Whether through natural wastage or redundancy, the result is reduced patient care. However the politicians try to spin it, the price of closed wards, fewer doctors and less medicine will be measured in reduced quality of care, longer waiting times and neglect, and ultimately in lives.
As the cost becomes clear, we are seeing he beginning of consistent opposition. The question now is whether the campaigning groups that have taken the lead in this can join forces with unions that have so far offered only token resistance.
Lewisham and Mid Yorks show what can be done. With 26 A&Es facing the axe at Lewisham, if one goes down the it will give the government the confidence to press on with the others. The closure of each new ward and A&E brings mass privatisation a step closer.
We need a mass national campaign to defend our NHS. It’s a service that we all have to use at some point in our lives, but without action now there will soon be nothing but a swamp of cutthroat healthcare companies competing in an overpriced and unregulated market.
A step forward would be to hold a national demonstration against all healthcare cuts. Health workers need to be organising in their unions and forming rank and file networks to ensure that workers decide what kind of action is effective and make it happen if the union bosses won’t fight.
The results of the Health and Social Care Bill will be incredibly difficult to reverse otherwise. It needs to be confronted and overturned before it’s too late.
