All around the country people are coming together to form local NHS defence groups. Here in Enfield a group calling itself Defend Enfield NHS (DeNHS) was set up last year. This weekend it will be holding its first public meeting (10am on Saturday 18th February at the New Crown in Southgate).
Ahead of the meeting DeNHS has issued a document setting out its concerns and the steps it is taking to defend the NHS in Enfield.
Defend Enfield NHS: Our talking points
We are a group of local people from the London Borough of Enfield who got together originally as a local 38 Degrees group.
These are some of the points that we will be making at our first public meeting on 18th February.
People support the NHS
The National Health Service (NHS) is a key part of British life. We pay for it through general taxation so that we can get the care we need, when we need it, free at the point of delivery. The NHS treats on average one million people every 36 hours. An overwhelming 84% of us believe it should be in public ownership.
The NHS is cost-effective
Far from being a ‘money pit’, NHS funding is now reduced to 8.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) compared with France’s 10.9% and Germany’s 11% GDP health spends. They face the same challenges as the UK - ageing populations, obesity, smoking and long term conditions like diabetes.
NHS privatisation is increasing – but is wasteful
Every year more services are contracted out, with 40% of contracts going to the private sector in 2015. £250 billion has been spent on using the private sector to build new hospitals, often locking the NHS into long-term loan repayments at high rates of interest, instead of spending the money on patient care. Far from boosting efficiency, the requirement for NHS commissioners to buy in services on a competitive basis adds in an extra layer of bureaucracy and is very expensive for both purchaser and provider. It is estimated that every year £4.5 billion is wasted in this way - enough to pay for either ten specialist hospitals; 174,798 extra nurses; 42,413 extra GPs. Meanwhile there are 25,000 nursing vacancies and the pay freeze has seen the value of NHS salaries reduce by 14%.
There are several examples of privatisation going seriously wrong; in 2014 a private company handed back the running of a Cambridgeshire hospital (after only three years of a ten year contract) after it was found to be neglecting patients. Our NHS has to step in and pick up the pieces when this happens
The NHS in Enfield is under threat again
Local people still remember how Highlands Hospital was closed in 1993 and the closure of the accident and emergency department at Chase Farm Hospital in 2013 without providing suitably enhanced services to compensate.
The number of hospital beds in England has fallen by 40,000 in the last 20 years. Commissioners will have to reduce the work done by providers (making waiting lists longer), change referral criteria (reducing our access to treatments), centralise services (making us travel further for treatment) and try to manage more patients outside hospital.
We are holding the local NHS to account
Enfield Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) meets in public and publishes its papers online - 524 pages for the most recent meeting, full of abbreviations and terminology that make it difficult for the general public to understand. We read those papers carefully and put questions to the officers. We have drawn up a detailed response outlining our concerns about the STP.
We have teamed up with health campaigns across England
We have joined Health Campaigns Together to share information and to work together with the many groups campaigning against closures and privatisations right across the country.
We support the NHS Bill
The Bill, which has cross-party support, proposes to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service, by abolishing the purchaser-provider split, ending contracting and re-establishing public bodies and public services accountable to local communities.
We are calling for
- No service closures (or ‘reconfigurations’) through STPs or any other process without full proper local consultation and consent.
- A publicly funded, provided, managed and staffed NHS which can comprehensively identify, prevent, manage and treat ill health
- Integration of our NHS with a properly publicly funded social care system
- The re-nationalisation of our NHS to exclude profit-orientated private providers and to return service accountability to government and the public.
We are marching for the NHS
On Saturday 4th March 2017, we will be joining campaigners from all over England to march in central London in support of our NHS. We warmly encourage you to join us. If you would like information on joining up with us to travel in with us, please sign up to our mailing list
Join DENHS
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Download our Talking Points leaflet
In recent weeks scarcely a day has gone by without new and very disturbing information about the crisis in the National Health Service. Ever longer waiting times in A&E departments, postponement of non-emergency operations, skilled surgeons having to waste their precious time waiting for beds to become available, hospital doctors buckling under stress, and so on - it seems that the tremendous improvements that we saw in the first decade of this century have all been overturned.
