By NHS Direct Action
Dear Andrew Lansley,
The NHS is the heart of Britain’s welfare state. It treats millions of people every year, and prevents millions more from living in fear of ill health. Your Health and Social Care Bill is set to butcher an institution owned by the people, for the people. Without a mandate you are proposing to spend £3 billion to carry out your reforms to destroy our NHS. Below, we outline some reasons for our action today.
The “Efficiency Savings” Myth – Your policy of ‘efficiency gains’ is both underhand and flawed. In reality ‘efficiency gains’ means cuts of £20 billion over the next three years, job losses starting at 50,000 and the almost complete removal of services such as translation. Bart’s Hospital is set to lose 630 jobs and 100 beds. £15 million cuts are being made at the Homerton hospital. King Georges A&E that serves 500,000 people is fighting closure. Leyton Health Clinic that has a children’s clinic and serves the community is fighting closure. District nurses and midwives have been sacked. In Camden two mental health hospitals have closed. This is just a fraction of what is happening in London. We know the savage destruction of our NHS is not specific to London but is UK wide. What is taking place is causing distress to patients and health workers.
Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the private sector that you propose to introduce has a more cumbersome and expensive bureaucracy than our current centralised system (as the private system in the US has shown).
The Bill:
1. Fragmentation – Allowing private providers to bid for services will undoubtedly lead to cherry-picking. The private sector will bid for the most lucrative services – for example dermatology and orthopedics – and leave hospitals to go bankrupt as they attempt to provide the expensive yet essential services such as end of life care and A&E. Continuity of care will also suffer as services are physically and administratively separated into different providers.2. GPs – GPs will be forced to act as holders of the £80 billion NHS budget in consortia. They are clinicians not administrators and do not have the time or the training to carry out this role. In order to manage this they will have to bring in managers and private accounting companies. The patient-doctor relationship will become secondary as GPs are forced to put profit first. Lord Owen has criticised the bill stating, ‘the patient-nurse relationship is personal, intimate and largely unquantifiable. Health is not a market commodity’.
3. Training – Amongst a myriad of services ignored by the bill and put at risk by the abolition of PCTs. Who will be responsible for training in an NHS broken up into privately run fragmented units? At Kings a government health official suggested to student nurses that communities would provide specialist training. When communities are facing massive cuts and health services are closing where will their specialist training come from?
4. The Loss of Altruism – Richard Titmuss expressed the mutually influencing relationship between institutions and society in the context of Britain’s blood donation system. The system, heralded worldwide for its quality and efficiency, is also under threat of privatisation. While in many countries blood is harvested by financial incentive – which comes with many risks to the donor and the recipient – the UK has a sustainable healthy system that avoids money all together. It is vital relationships like these that are under threat from the H&SC Bill.
5. Impartiality of the Reforms – Recent financial transactions between yourself, John Nash, (the former chairman and now consultant to Care UK) and Caroline Nash illustrates who has influence over decisions made about the NHS. You received a personal donation of £21,000 from Caroline Nash for your election campaign. Whilst Mr. and Mrs. Nash gave the Tory party over £200,000. Care UK was recently awarded a £53,000,000 NHS contract. This suggests that the H&SC Bill may not have been written purely with public interest at heart.
Andrew Lansley, we believe that you are not fully independent in your position as Secretary of State for Health. You have not listened to doctors, nurses, politicians or the people. The NHS is being dismantled without a mandate and so we ask you not only to withdraw your bill, but also to resign as you have proven that you are not fit to be our Secretary of State for Health.
By NHS direct action.
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News & Comment
Well done for highlighting the disastrous consequences of Lansley’s so-called reforms. The sooner they are abandoned the better. The NHS should remain in public ownership to serve public interests rather than the creeping sclerosis of marketisation, privatisation and profit.
Ian Townson
Of all the Con Dem Crimes this has to be the worst. Also the riskiest for them. The Tories have craved to abolish and privatise the NHS ever since Thatcher. Blair did half the job for them.
Unbelieving that they now have the opportunity to step up to the roullette wheel and finish it, on a tiny minority vote, with no mandate whatsover, I guess they are just chancing on the big one while they can.
If they do not come unstuck on this one, we are lost. Britain will be the next US state. The Tories warping of NHS statistics and results are worthy of Goebells. Most research proves the NHS is still working. Amazing considering the attacks on it from the right for decades now. Statistics not helpful to their chums in private healthcare, who are just salivating at another slice of the public cake. This time the whole bloody cake in fact.
It sickens me to my gut to see and hear multimillionaire Cameron weep over his dead son, praising the NHS that tried to save him, whilst at the same time plotting to scrap it. Some bloody father eh?
Scrap the bloody Tories and this unelected millionaires gambling club. Long live the NHS
It has been reported that Cameron (rather than Lansley) is backing down on some of these points:
“Under the terms of the compromise deal, GPs who do not want to take charge of the health service budget for their area will not now be forced to do so.
“The Government is also planning amendments to limit the market proposed in health care, with safeguards which will attempt to prevent private firms “cherry-picking” the most profitable services and leaving NHS hospitals at a disadvantage.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8423695/David-Cameron-retreats-on-NHS-reforms.html
Of course, this watering down doesn’t go far enough ( http://torylies.blogspot.com/2011/04/nhs-u-turn.html ), but it would be worth updating the letter to reflect this news, and press the advantage further
I Agree with Leon .
May the NHS be Around Forever unlike the Filthy Arrogant Out of Touch
and Tyrannical Con Dem Regime .
We Need the NHS Given Constitutional Protection and for that We Need a
Decent Government Not this Tory Wrecking Crew
I absolutely agree with everything expressed in the “letter to Andrew Lansley” (also love the Andrew Lansey Rap and hope it goes round and round in his head every night as he lays it on the pillow and tries to sleep!).
My question is though, how can we more easily find out what we can to do help?
I live in Wales, which is run by a coalition government of Labour (Welsh Labour is Proper Labour!) and Plaid Cymru and we won’t be re-organised as the Welsh Assembly Government recognises that the NHS is doing the best job it ever has: wonderful people happy to update their skills in the face of new technology and discoveries, recent new buildings and state of the art equipment …. I want to keep it that way for everyone, more than that, export the ideology of altruism and impartiality, lack of profit motive, around the globe!
Andrew Lansley, you can hide information from us about patient satisfaction, but you cannot run! This will come back to haunt you when people die! Cutting services and welfare budgets and then potentially denying best care? Where are the profits to come from? Our blood? Oh, you already thought of that …. forgot!
And finally, why did Cameron and his wife who stands to inherit wealth beyond many dreams entrust the care of their son, who very sadly did die, to NHS when they had millions, indeed billions, to spend on private care? Becuase the NHS is the single most trusted, capable, caring, forward thinking, altuistic, independent (words fail me here, create your own) institution! PLEASE READ THIS CAMERON, DON’T FECK WITH WHAT AIN’T BROKEN! AND STOP YOUR SILLY BOYS FROM TRYING TO DO SO!