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Working to Reinstate, Protect and Improve your NHS
Thursday 26th December 2013
Christmas and New Year message from the National Health Action Party
NHS heads for a winter of discontent, but the National Health Action Party will continue to defend the NHS and provide solutions to restore and improve it
2013 has already been a very difficult year for the NHS, and pressures are only going to increase this winter. Ongoing austerity at a time of massive NHS reorganisation is clearly taking its toll with service cuts, staff shortages, bed shortages, hospital closures and management chaos, leading to crises in emergency care and social care, rising waiting lists, and intense pressure on GP services. Of course this was all predicted by the leaked version of the NHS Risk Register 3 years ago, which not surprisingly, the Government still refuses to publish.
The Government's costly and unwanted top down reorganisation was designed to dismantle and increasingly privatise the NHS, and this is happening at an alarming rate with £2.5 billion worth of NHS contracts given to the private sector since the new Health Act became law in April this year. The privatisation process will accelerate if NHS services are included in the EU/US Free Trade Agreement, which will irreversibly open the door to global private healthcare companies to bid for NHS contracts. As the first political party to raise this as an issue, we will continue to fight hard for the NHS to be exempted from this Free Trade Agreement.
NHS austerity is set to continue for at least another 5 years so that the funding gap could be between £44-54 billion by 2020-21. Worse still, the Treasury has clawed back £5bn of the NHS budget over the last 3 years, whilst still trying to claim that NHS spending has not fallen in real terms. The NHS will not be able to cope with this level of cuts and service failure is inevitable. It is already happening in places and that is precisely what this Government wants to happen to allow their privatisation plans to flourish.
Successful public services "crowd out" the private sector, whereas "failing" public services are seen as ripe for privatisation. NHS failures such as the Mid Staffs scandal have undermined public confidence in the NHS. The right wing media is constantly denigrating the NHS to soften up the public to swallow the privatisation pill.
Whilst we must accept that the NHS is far from perfect and there have been unacceptable patches of poor care in the system, we need to expose the real reasons for the problems in the NHS: chronic underfunding, constant re-disorganisations, and 30 years of a failed market in healthcare with the purchaser-provider split, which has separated General Practice from Hospital care and massively increased administration costs gulping up to 10% of total NHS budget.
The NHS needs restoring and improving, not dismantling and privatising. In early 2014 we will launch our new 12 point plan for the NHS, which will keep it in public hands, reverse privatisation, increase accountability, increase the focus on public health, and reject economic austerity, which is so damaging to the health of our economy and population. We will also be announcing our plans for the European elections in May 2014.
Meanwhile, here is some information about what our NHS does for the nation, which will help to put all the bad news stories in context:
The NHS manages over 1 million patients every 36 hours
The NHS deals with 15 million admissions per year (41,500 patients admitted every day)
The NHS performs over 10 million operations per year
There are over 300 million GP consultations per year
The NHS deals with 21.7 million Accident and Emergency cases per year (61,000 patients per day)
The NHS ranks as one of the most cost effective, equitable and efficient health services in the world
The NHS is amazing
The NHAP exists to defend the NHS as a public service and will never give up on it. It was a precious gift to our nation following the war effort, and it would be a travesty to lose it. Our committee and staff are absolutely committed and continue to fight hard, but we need your help and continued support if we are going to make a real difference.
Please help us by forwarding this e-mail and encouraging your friends and colleagues to join us, or at least follow us on social media. DONATE if you can. Please spread the word about the National Health Action Party and help us help the NHS.
We wish you a very Happy Christmas and New Year
The Executive Committee of the NHAP