NHS cuts

[DeedeeD]

Is anyone else worried about the government's plans for the NHS? It's giving me more sleepless nights than my dd ever did.

What are they planning? Do you know?

The NHS budget isn't cut but it's not increasing as fast as it was. There are some changes being proposed to the organisation of how funding is allocated with GPs being asked to take more of a lead. But the principle that treatment is free to patients at the point of need still stands. If you're worried to the point of losing sleep then talk to your GP and ask them what they think.

There's a lot about it on: NHS reforms- anyone else as disbelieving as I am.

Basically the NHS is being broken up. So instead of integrated, coherent large Primary Care Trusts and Health Authorities, there will be lots of little consortia of GP surgeries, behaving like little competing businesses. These will then put work (ie patients) out to hospitals, also little competing businesses (iiuc).

The GPs will then have to do the admin work that is currently done by professional administrators (most of them much cheaper than a GP). Of course very few GPs will do this, but that's OK because there are big private companies which will offer to do it all for them. This change is about "creating opportunities for private enterprise" within taxpayer-funded services - ie diverting taxpayers' money into shareholders' profits.

There are many questions about this:
? how will fragmentation affect continuity of care?
? who will do coherent large-scale public health planning?
? who has accountability when something goes medically wrong or a patient falls between fragmented stools?
? what happens when a private admin company effects client capture, and is so deeply involved that the consortium supposedly employing it can no longer simply sack it?
? how will GP consortia negotiate favourable prices with drug companies, as NICE and big local authorities/trusts can do?
? and lastly, why on earth would you bother with this expensive restructuring unless the ultimate aim is privatisation?

Fragmentation is a pre-requisite for privatisation because the NHS is too big to sell as a whole and it's politically unacceptable. So instead you fragment the NHS and tell people service won't change; outsource fragments and tell people service won't change; change payment from taxation to pay-per-use and tell people it won't affect the poorest; etc etc

More info and Unison campaign here

From the BMJ:

The scale of ambition ( of the reforms) should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world.
Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, ?The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world
This latest top down reorganisation has been whipped up in an awful hurry. It went unmentioned in the political manifestos of the coalition parties before the last general election, was specifically excluded in pledges given before and after the election, and didn?t make it into the Coalition Agreement of 20 May 2010. Yet less than eight weeks later, its outline emerged in the white paper.

Lots of people having sleepless nights. I hope the GP's can cope with the rush.

There is no need for tthe government reforms.

In the words of Simon Stevens, president of global health at UnitedHealth Group, a company that stands to benefit from the reforms, ?The inconvenient truth is that on most indicators the English NHS is probably performing better than ever.?

This change is about "creating opportunities for private enterprise" within taxpayer-funded services - ie diverting taxpayers' money into shareholders' profits.

I have posted on the other string- I work for the NHS- I want people to lobby their MP's and to protest about the reorganisation and the proposed cuts and privatisation of the NHS

in brief I want to direct people to the information and campaigning support provided by the website www.keepournhspublic.com/index.php