Bankrupting the NHS
WORKERS, JAN 2007 ISSUE
In the first week of December Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health, boasted that she would resign if NHS trusts did not balance their books by the end of the financial year. Seven days later the Chief Executive of the NHS admitted that flawed accounting practices associated with the deficits, cuts and the present crisis made it impossible for the NHS to balance its books. Hewitt won't be resigning.
At least 13 trusts are heading for bankruptcy and the £600 million in the red will be there next year and the year after that. Are these two announcements linked? Does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing? Or is this government by the cretinous for those with an attention span of less than a week? This would be one compulsory redundancy that NHS workers will cheer in the aisles, so come on Hewitt – go now!
Blair also announced, from behind the Downing Street gates, that the present deficits, cuts, closures, redundancies, scrapping of training and so on are to save lives. He said that the reconfiguration of health is about establishing new super regional health care provision and has nothing to do with handing the NHS over to private companies and profiteers. At the same time NHS trusts were told to gear themselves up to advertise their services and at least one London NHS Human Resources Director is talking of profit-related pay as part of the "cafeteria of benefits" he intends to offer staff. Staff, presumably, is anybody left in direct employment who hasn't been outsourced, offshored or subcontracted.
Every week a new interpretation of the NHS crisis is invented by Downing Street. Next week it will be NHS workers are paid too much. The following week that the NHS employs too many doctors, nurses, bureaucrats, but not enough cleaners! And will the EU rumour that health care provision is to be related to population density, e.g. one major regional centre to xx number of possible patients, come to fruition?
The TUC and the NHS Together trade unions are now looking to either regional demonstrations or one national event in early March 2007. Though the debate in the trade unions has not been settled over exactly where or when, there are weekly marches, rallies and demonstrations across England over the threat to the NHS. Remember, devolution has splintered off Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland from uniting against these attacks on the NHS.
But as with the recent lobby of Parliament, a regional or national demonstration on its own is not going to resolve the issue of saving public health care provision. That can only be achieved by a fundamentally new political direction.