11:17am Tuesday 9th March 2010
Many of your readers will have missed the consultation exercise currently being conducted by the NHS in North East London on the future of health services in the area which closes on 22nd March.
Proposals covered by the exercise include closing the accident and emergency and maternity units at King Georges Hospital and establishing a polyclinic on the site. Significantly the consultation document does not mention proposals to cut a total of 821 beds in East London from 2011, including 174 beds at Whipps Cross, or that NHS bosses are looking for to cut up to a third of spending on nursing costs and nearly half of spending on doctors.
Waltham Forest Keep Our NHS Public is concerned that, like similar previous exercises, the public is not being given the full picture or being genuinely consulted. We do not believe that these proposals are in the interest of NHS users in North East London or the NHS as a whole.
We are concerned that the future of our health care is being shaped to channel income to the private corporations involved in Queens and the London Hospital's PFI builds. We are seeing a slow but steady encroachment of the private sector into the NHS and the fragmentation of health care. Polyclinics such as that proposed at King Georges claim to bring NHS services closer to the community but are in fact a half way house to privatisation.
They threaten existing hospitals and undermine of the ethos of the NHS as non-profit making and free at the point of use. Already the polyclinic set up in Leyton last year and the urgent care centre at Whipps, are partly run by PELC, a not for profit organisation, but one that is not part of the NHS.
Community health in North East London has been reorganised on the market model with local Primary Care Trusts being divided into service commissioning bodies and service providers. There have been swingeing cuts in community health care with drastic reductions in health visitor and community nurse numbers with severe consequences for local community health provision. NHS London is putting pressure on local PCTs to transfer community health services over to so-called Social Enterprises, a further step down the road of privatisation.
A report commissioned by the British Medical Association warns that NHS London is planning to cut £6 billion in health care spending over the next five years. A third of hospital beds could go as cuts tear apart the health framework at every level. The report warns of “a wholesale reduction in hospitals, community services and primary care”. On 6th May local residents will be asked to choose the next government of this country. Unfortunately all the major political parties accept that major cuts in public services are inevitable. They all accept the mantra private good - public bad. These assumptions will have major implications for the NHS, whatever politicians say now.
We urge your readers to respond to the consultation exercise. We hope they will challenge all prospective Parliamentary candidates to give a public commitment to a publicly owned and controlled, nationally integrated health service free at the point of use. But we should also remember our successful campaign to stop the closure of Whipps and be prepared to hit the streets again to defend the NHS on which we all depend.
Tony Phillips, Chair, Waltham Forest Keep Our NHS Public.
Janet Maiden, UNISON Health Service Group Executive (personal capacity).
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