Say goodbye to the NHS

Many people have been warning about this for years and while many are in disbelief that a government would promote the selling off one the greatest institutions in this nation the truth is that the last 6 governments have been slowly priming the NHS for privatisation.

We all knew that the NHS has been deteriorating and now is in a dire state. A leading Doctor said that general practice is on the brink of collapse, hospitals have closed. and for those that remain have had beds removed and those are being filled by people who should be receiving social care from councils yet due to cuts on their budgets local authorities aren’t able to provide them.

According to a NHS survey almost half of nurses are saying their wards are understaffed, and since Brexit nursing job applications from the EU have dropped 96% and since the cutting of the bursary for nursing student’s applications have dropped by 23%. This has and will impact on the service they can provide.

My father was in hospital 4 years ago with a rare neurological condition and he had good service there was many nurses’ different ones every time we visited, other than the standing staff, and he regularly saw doctors and consultants and had tests done very quickly and was out within 4 weeks. My Grandfather is currently in hospital he has been in there for over three weeks, he has had the same 4 overworked nurses, he has seen a doctor once in that time and is still waiting on tests.

I myself had a recent epileptic seizure in April and saw a doctor in early May and I was given the option of a referral to my local hospital since I wouldn’t be in Cambridge over summer and 3 weeks ago I was placed on a 23 week waiting list to see a neurologist at my local hospital utterly useless since I would be back in Cambridge in November. While this view is limited to one department in one hospital it is clear there has been a strain placed on the neurological departments and there is less staff and much, much slower service.

How did this begin well it all starts in 2000 where the NHS was broken up into foundation trusts so it was logistically harder to run but a lot easier to privatise and sell off assets. The £5 billion “spent” on building 103 new hospitals between 1997 and 2010 was borrowed from Private Finance initiatives or PFI’s.

These schemes involve contracting a private company to build a hospital and have said company provide services for the building and any change to or extra services would be charged at scandalous rates, like hospitals having 64 pest control visits every year regardless if pests are present and if pest appear between scheduled visits then a charge would be incurred to remove the pest. This approach was short sighted and straggled the new hospitals with debt £60 billion in debt, this will not be paid off until 2048.

In 2009 the McKinsey report on the fiscal future of the NHS set out the selling of two thirds of NHS property. This was followed by legislation that allowed the debt of a new hospital to be the justification of the selling of the assets of other hospitals that were publicly owned and debt free. The Conservative-Liberal democrat coalition passed the health and social care act of 2012 which caused the creation of the private firm NHS property services which was given control of 11% of NHS assets.

Now we are here in 2017 with the Naylor review conducted by a doctor who runs a private practice and gives only one option to the NHS to purchase specialised and vital equipment like MRI’s or CT scanners and that is to sell off assets, land and hospitals through a fire sale. To encourage this sale for every pound the NHS can procure the treasury will give them 2 more.

Just like with the police force and royal mail the NHS is being stripped of all assets from hospitals to clinics and the worst part is that the £10bn that is being put into the NHS Is to help sell it off, yes the government is using taxpayers money to prepare for the sale of the NHS.

Theresa May despite her claiming that the NHS is not for sale her “complete” support for the Naylor report means this cannot be true, while the results of the general election has probably hindered any plans implement the Naylor review don’t forget that many of the crucial steps leading to this report were back by Tories, Lib dems and labour MPs alike and thus any effort to prevent this must be unified and massive.

I must be honest as someone who considers himself politically informed and not only a informed citizen but an active one learning that for the last 20 years the British people have been played, mislead and lied to by our elected officials, people who were supposed to represent us and our views to guide the country the way we wanted yet did this and in such a deceptive way is utterly infuriating.

                                         

                                          I am going to fight tooth and nail, What about you?