Thursday 11th March 2010
The great progress and promise of our NHS is being undermined by progressive patchwork privatisation. This damaging process of privatisation has:
- Converted the NHS into a market, driving NHS Hospitals and GPs into competition with each other instead of working together to care for patients
- Compelled the NHS to 'contract out' clinical work to private companies, some working in Independent (Private) Sector Treatment Centres, costing more cash and working less well than NHS clinics can
- Forced Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to allow private health corporations to take over GP surgeries. Companies interested first and foremost in making a financial profit from treating the sick can now replace your local doctors
- Obliged hospitals and local health bodies to invite private companies to take over key NHS services. No longer just car parking, cooking and cleaning, they must invite private bids for core clinical services like bone and brain scans, physiotherapy, psychology and even surgical centres and local GP surgeries
- Appointed private sector companies into key NHS decision-making seats. Here they directly influence the spending of vast sums of public money to commission NHS services, some from private sector companies. This creates huge potential for favoured deals and conflicts of interest. A Competition and Cooperation Panel acts as enforcer, making sure NHS managers don't resist these privatisation drives
- Forced Primary Care Trusts (under the government's programme "Transforming Community Services") to divide into commissioner and provider arms - the better to introduce privatisation into community health services
"Our fundamental purpose is simple but hugely important: to restore the NHS as a public service, working cooperatively for patients, not a commercial business driven by competition."
TELL THEM WHERE YOU STAND!
- Write to your MP/local Council/mayor/ the minister for health (Find out who your MP is and how to contact them)
- Contact your local paper/radio/TV, etc.
- Attend your local PCT/Health Scrutiny Committee public meeting (Find out when they meet on your local PCT or council website)
- Ask your GP to support the British Medical Association campaign
- Disturb the peace of those who refuse to believe a government would ever do anything so scandalous as privatise the NHS
March to defend the Welfare State and Public Services
London, Saturday April 10
Assemble 12 noon Victoria Gardens
Rally 2pm Trafalgar Square
Called by National Pensioners Convention, supported by Keep our NHS Public, Health Emergency, health unions and the wider trade union movement.
Download pdf A5 flyer
Essential Reading
Johnathon Tomlinson's article Patients not Profits; the NHS and Corporate Healthcare - a GP's view of how the big corporations dehumanise health care.More articles on Primary Care and other key issues can be found in Policy Briefings.
Bookshelf
Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism
Edited by Leo Panitch and Colin LeysA survey of the political economy of health.
Special Offer: Special price to KONP members of £12 inc p&p compared with £15.99 in the shops.
For further information see our Bookshelf page.
Make a donation
If we are going to halt and reverse the government's rapid march towards privatisation and marketisation of the NHS, we need resources to enable us to reach out to the large number of individuals and organisations who should also be aware of the issues at stake and involved in the campaign.Your support is crucial! We rely on the donations of NHS supporters to fund this campaign. Please help if you can - click here to make a donation.
Essential reading from Stewart Player and Colin Leys
Details in Bookshelf
Conference videos
Condition Critical:
Health Care, Marketising Reforms and the Media
Held at Coventry University
June 17-20
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