Tag: NHS

SUPPORT THE JUNIOR DOCTORS STRIKE; DEFEND THE NHS

BARNSLEY TRADES COUNCIL

SUPPORT THE JUNIOR DOCTORS STRIKE; DEFEND THE NHS

8am Wed. Feb. 10th Barnsley Hospital

Barnsley Trades Council is calling on trade unions to send delegations to the Gawber Road entrance of Barnsley Hospital at 8amonwards on Wed. February 10th to show solidarity with the junior doctors’ strike and picket.

Bring your union banners and flags and make your own placards. Around 25 trade unionists joined the striking doctors last time – it would be great if we can make that number bigger.

AXE THE TORY ANTI-TRADE UNION BILL

Protest 12pm – 1pm Thursday Feb. 11th Town Hall Steps – (below the fountains).

Barnsley Trades Council has organised a protest against the Tories’ anti Trade Union Bill as part of a national TUC day of action. We are calling on unions to send delegations, bring banners and placards and come prepared to speak.

We have to defend our unions and defend our right to strike. That is why solidarity with the doctors is so important as well as defying the Tories’ anti trade union laws.

Barnsley Green Party: Supporting Junior Doctors

Barnsley Green Party member Dominic Wood, on support for today’s Junior Doctor’s strike.

Caroline Natalie

It was a clear, bright sky that smiled over our Junior Doctor friends at Barnsley District & General Hospital this morning…

Safety is their paramount concern. The dispute is about contracts. BMA (British Medical Association) IRA representative Maria Butterfield was quoted as saying, “We have been asked not to bring banners. This is about the doctors and there message, which is clear and simple.”

Under the new contracts being offered, Student Doctors would have the EU legislative legal protection removed that currently prohibits the working of more than 48 hours a week. The reason for this legal prohibition is the well known and documented fact that tired doctors can kill patients. Unwittingly. Accidentally. Through being pushed to work longer hours than their mental and physical capacities can sustain.

That is why, said a Junior Doctor training in anaesthetics, we are striking in Barnsley today and on the 26th. We care about patients. We came into this profession because we want to help people and patient safety is paramount. Tired doctors can’t work to the best of their ability, much as they would like to do so.

Think about Patient Safety please, Mr. Cameron!

A call from the BMA to all Unite Community activists – WE NEED YOU!

Junior Doctors across England will be commencing industrial action on Tuesday 12th January. We are opposing this government’s attempt to impose an unsafe new contract on the medical profession. It is our view that the proposed contract represents an existential danger to the NHS as an institution.

You may be aware that the BMA had initially suspended its planned industrial action at the start of December and returned to talks with the Department of Health. That decision was made in good faith. However, over the last few weeks, in the course of negotiations with Government we have encountered only intransigence. It is clear that the government perceives our contract issue as pivotal for its attempt to “reform” the NHS towards a neoliberal, commercialised system.

It is therefore evident to us that we have no choice but to transform our 98% ballot mandate into action.

The developments of the next few months will have consequences stretching far into the future. This government is wilfully putting at risk our patients’ safety, the tolerability of our working lives as NHS workers and the very viability of the NHS as a publicly-funded, publicly-provided service.

Why we need YOU

The coming period will be the ultimate test of the BMA’s resolve as a Union. However, we remain mindful of the fact that the BMA is not an abstract entity operating in isolation from wider political developments. There is no way that we can win this on our own. We need all concerned citizens, activists and trade unionists to stand alongside us in this fight.

Over the last few months we have been in dialogue with many trade unionists throughout the country and we have been enormously grateful for their support both at a local and national level. The public messages of support from our allied health worker colleagues, the firefighters, the teaching unions and the TUC and TUCG unions have galvanised junior doctors.

We are therefore well aware that all eyes are upon us and that the institutions which represent the wider working class stand with us in solidarity.

We are in no doubt that Osborne, Cameron and Hunt will use the proposed doctor’s contract as a tool for achieving the destruction of safe terms and conditions throughout the NHS and throughout the public sector. The Conservative Party is attempting to stretch the NHS into an ostensibly 7-day elective service whilst simultaneously launching the biggest assault on NHS resources in its history. The politics of austerity represents a clear and present danger to the nation’s health.

A victory for the Junior Doctors would signify the first real crack in the entire edifice of austerity in the UK.

Please stand with us. And when you need us, ask us. We will stand by you.

Invitation to attend our pickets

On behalf of the entire BMA we thank you all for your incredible support so far. Many of you will have seen the details with regards to the planned action and I will reiterate them below. We invite you to come out and display your visible support for us on the days of action.

•The action will begin with an emergency care-only model, which would see junior doctors provide the same level of service that happens in their given specialty, hospital or GP practice on Christmas Day. It will then escalate to full walk-outs. The action as proposed is:

Emergency care only — 24 hrs from 8am Tuesday 12 January to 8am Wednesday 13 January

Emergency care only — 48 hrs from 8am Tuesday 26th January to 8am Thursday 28 January

Full withdrawal of labour — from 8am to 5pm Wednesday 10th February

•The aim is to picket all major hospitals in England on all three days of proposed action. Pickets will be in the vicinity of the main entrances and will start at 8am, continuing until at least 12.30pm. However, many picket sites will continue into the evening, especially at the larger hospitals.

•Along with the pickets there will be parallel “Meet the Doctors” events at nearby transport stops or public spaces. We will direct you to these events from the picket.

•Please turn up on the days of action, and give us your support. We will then inform you if other local events are planned on the day. If you are an allied health worker, trade unionist or campaigner please do consider bringing along the banner representing your organisation, your working uniform or similar. We would appreciate it however if banners in explicit endorsement of specific political parties are not displayed and that any selling of campaign literature such as newspapers is relatively discreet.

•On the days of action, please do debate us, educate us and invite us to address your colleagues in your workplace or trade union branch.

Just as the social democratic consensus in this country began with the inception of the NHS in 1948 so too will the NHS be the site of Britain’s last stand against the all-consuming forces of austerity.

Solidarity is the antidote to the cynicism of those in power. Now is the time to stand together in a common defence of the NHS. If not now, when?

Kind regards

Dr Yannis Gourtsoyannis, Member of BMA Junior Doctors Committee National Executive.

Please share these memes on social media to show your support.

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Barnsley Picket – 12 January

Barnsley Trades Council is calling for a solidarity with the Junior Doctor’s picket, starting at 8am on Tues Jan 12th, to join their first strike picket-line at the Gawber Road entrance of Barnsley Hospital. Please spread the word and bring banners, flags and placards. UNITY IS STRENGTH

Junior Doctors’ Strike

As you no doubt know, the Junior Doctors are due to come out on strike on

12 January 2016

Emergency care only between 8am on Tuesday, 12 January and 8am on Wednesday, 13 January (24 hours)

26 January 2016 – 28 January 2016

Emergency care only between 8am on Tuesday, 26 January and 8am on Thursday, 28 January (48 hours)

10 February 2016

Full withdrawal of labour between 8am and 5pm on Wednesday, 10 February.

You can find further information, including a picketing map, at  http://oneprofession.bma.org.uk/

The BMA have informed us that most picket lines will be from 8.00am to 10.00 at local hospitals. In larger towns members are going into the town centre at 10.00 for a rally and then back to the hospital, but I’m afraid that I don’t have any more specific information at the moment, as this has been left for local representatives to organise.

Cuts to services

Cuts to young people’s health services are being planned with the possibility of privatisation also Unite and Unison are planning resistance to the cuts along with community save our NHS campaigners press release below.

Defend Children’s Health Services in Barnsley – a message on behalf of local Health Visitors and School Nurses.

On 1st October Barnsley Council takes on responsibility for commissioning (planning and paying for) Health and Wellbeing services for children and young people (0-19).

This includes Health Visiting, School Nursing and the Family Nurse Partnership that works with young mothers (aged 19 & under).

The service is currently commissioned by the NHS and provided by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Trust (SWYPFT) and costs around £6.5 million per year. On 1st October Barnsley Council takes on this responsibility.

But even before it has taken on the responsibility for it Barnsley Council has put the service out to tender, with bids to provide the service after June next year being due in on 5th October.

Apart from the fact the service could be privatised and provided by a company such as Virgin Health the Council have said they will not accept bids to provide the service in the future costing over £4.8 million pounds per year.

That is a £1.7 million pound cut to start with, though the Council also wants the children’s oral health service including as well, and says in the contract it will withhold up to 1.25% of the money due if it pays it’s provider promptly.

Nearly £2 million pounds are being cut from children’s health services by this move, almost a third of what is currently spent. This is on top of cuts to social work teams and Children’s Centres.

We are writing this as the unions representing Health Visiting, School Nursing, The Family Nurse Partnership and their support staff.

You cannot take nearly 1/3 of the money out of the budget without this resulting in a worse service to children and their families in Barnsley and the loss of over 30-40 qualified nurses and support staff.

The Council might think there are some savings that can be made. But this scale of budget cut will leave an unsafe service and risk vulnerable children dying. The children of Barnsley deserve better than this.

Please call upon your local Councillors and MPs to halt the tendering process and to put the money into the service that it needs.

RCN (Royal College of Nursing), UNISON and UNITE representatives in SWYPFT.

Ross Pritchard Memorial Fund Annual Essay Competition

Annual Essay Competition, open to all trade unionists, first prize £750, closing date Saturday 26 September.

The RPMF was established to commemorate the life of one of the Graphical, Paper & Media Union’s best known rank and file members, Ross Pritchard.

The Trustees of the Fund invite entries to the annual essay competition on a subject dear to Ross’s heart, this year:

“How should we build the public struggle in defence of the NHS?”

1,000 words maximum

Essays should be submitted to megan@gn.apc.org by 26 September 2015 and you must include your name, postal address and trade union (including your Branch or Region).

https://www.facebook.com/events/993198574066385/

Download the flyer: ad2015

“Hunger, filth, fear and death”: remembering life before the NHS

This article by Harry Leslie Smith originally appeared in the New Statesman.

Harry Leslie Smith, a 91-year-old RAF veteran born into an impoverished mining family, recalls a Britain without a welfare state.

Don’t forget to join the March for the NHS in Leeds on March 28.

Grim up north:  Harry Leslie Smith grew up in coal-mining Barnsley, Yorkshire. Photo: Getty

Over 90 years ago, I was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to a working-class family. Poverty was as natural to us as great wealth and power were to the aristocracy of that age. Like his father and grandfather before him, my dad, Albert, eked out a meagre existence as a miner, working hundreds of feet below the surface, smashing the rock face with a pickaxe, searching for coal.

Hard work and poor wages didn’t turn my dad into a radical. They did, however, make him an idealist, because he believed that a fair wage, education, trade unions and universal suffrage were the means to a prosperous democracy. He endured brutal working conditions but they never hardened his spirit against his family or his comrades in the pits. Instead, the harsh grind of work made his soul as gentle as a beast of burden that toiled in desolate fields for the profit of others.

My mother, Lillian, however, was made of sterner stuff. She understood that brass, not love, made the world go round. So when a midwife with a love of gin and carbolic soap delivered me safely on a cold winter’s night in February 1923 into my mum’s exhausted arms, I was swaddled in her rough-and-ready love, which toughened my skin with a harsh affection. I was the first son but I had two elder sisters who had already skinned their knees and elbows in the mad fight to stay alive in the days before the social safety network. Later on, our family would include two half-brothers, after my mother was compelled to look for a more secure provider than my dad during the Great Depression.

By the time I was weaned from my mother’s breast, I had begun to learn the cruel lessons that the world inflicted on its poor. At the age of seven, my eldest sister, Marion, contracted tuberculosis, which was a common and deadly disease for those who lived hand to mouth in early-20th-century Britain. Her illness was directly spawned from our poverty, which forced us to live in a series of fetid slums.

Despite being a full-time worker, my dad was always one pay packet away from destitution. Several times, my family did midnight flits and moved from one decre­pit single-bedroom tenement to the next. Yet we never seemed to move far from the town’s tip, a giant wasteland stacked with rotting rubbish, which became a playground for preschool children.

At the beginning of my life, affordable health care was out of reach for much of the population. A doctor’s visit could cost the equivalent of half a week’s wages, so most people relied on good fortune rather than medical advice to see them safely through an illness. But luck and guile went only so far and many lives were snatched away before they had a chance to start. The wages of the ordinary worker were at a mere subsistence level and therefore medicine or simple rest was out of the question for many people.

Unfortunately for my sister, luck was also in short supply in our household. Because my parents could neither afford to see a consultant nor send my sister to a sanatorium, Marion’s TB spread and infected her spine, leaving her an invalid.

****

The 1926 General Strike, which began just as my sister started her slow and painful journey from life to death, was about more than wages to my dad and many others. It was called by the TUC in protest against mine owners who were using strong-arm tactics to force their workers to accept longer work hours for less take-home pay. At its start, it involved 1.7 million industrialised workers.

In essence, the strike was about the right of all people, regardless of their economic station, to live a dignified and meaningful life. My father joined it with enthusiasm, because he believed that all workers, from tram drivers to those who dug ore, deserved a living wage. But for my father the strike  was also about the belief that he might be able to right the wrongs done to him and his family; if only he had more money in his pay packet, he might have been able to afford decent health care for all of us.

Unfortunately, the General Strike was crushed by the government, which first bullied TUC members to return to their work stations. Eight months later, it did the same to the miners whose communities had been beggared by being on the pickets for so long. My dad and his workmates had to accept wage cuts.

I remember my sister’s pain and anguish during her final weeks of life in October 1926. I’d play beside her in our parlour, which was as squalid as an animal pen, while she lay on a wicker landau, tied down by ropes to prevent her from falling to the ground while unattended. When Marion’s care became too much for my mother to endure, she was sent to our neighbourhood workhouse, which had been imprisoning the indigent since the days of Charles Dickens.

The workhouse where Marion died was a large, brick building less than a mile from our living quarters. Since it had been designed as a prison for the poor, it had few windows and had a high wall surrounding it. When my sister left our house and was transported there on a cart pulled by an old horse, my mum and dad told my other sister and me to wave goodbye, because Marion was going to a better place than here.

The workhouse was not used only as a prison for those who had been ruined by poverty; it also had a primitive infirmary attached to it, where the poor could receive limited medical attention. Perhaps the only compassion the place allowed my parents was permission to visit their daughter to calm her fears of death.

My sister died behind the thick, limestone walls at the age of ten, and perhaps the only compassion the place allowed my parents was permission to visit their daughter to calm her fears of death. As we didn’t have the money to give her a proper burial, Marion was thrown into a communal grave for those too poor to matter. Since then, the pauper’s pit has been replaced by a dual carriageway.

****

Some historians have called the decade of my birth “the Roaring Twenties” but for most it was a long death rattle. Wages were low, rents were high and there was little or no job protection as a result of a postwar recession that had gutted Britain’s industrial heartland. When the Great Depression struck Britain in the 1930s, it turned our cities and towns into a charnel house for the working class, because they had no economic reserves left to withstand prolonged joblessness and the ruling class believed that benefits led to fecklessness.

Even now, when I look back to those gaslight days of my boyhood and youth, all I can recollect is hunger, filth, fear and death. My mother called those terrible years for our family, our friends and our nation a time when “hard rain ate cold Yorkshire stone for its tea”.

I will never forget seeing as a teenager the faces of former soldiers who had been broken physically and mentally during the Great War and were living rough in the back alleys of Bradford. Their faces were haunted not by the brutality of the war but by the savagery of the peace. Nor will I forget as long as I shall live the screams that fell out of dosshouse windows from the dying and mentally ill, who were denied medicine and solace because they didn’t have the money to pay for medical services.

Like today, those tragedies were perpetuated by a coalition government preaching that the only cure for our economic troubles was a harsh austerity, which promised to right Britain’s finances through the sacrifice of its lowest-paid workers. When my dad got injured, the dole he received was ten shillings a week. My family, like millions of others, were reduced to beggary. In the 1930s, the government believed that private charities were more suitable for providing alms for those who had been ruined in the Great Depression.

Austerity in the 1930s was like a pogrom against Britain’s working class. It blighted so many lives through preventable ailments caused by malnutrition, as well as thwarting ordinary people’s aspirations for a decent life by denying them housing, full- time employment or a proper education.

As Britain’s and my family’s economic situation worsened in the 1930s, we upped sticks from Barnsley to Bradford in the hope that my father might find work. But there were too many adults out of work and jobs were scarce, so he never found full-time employment again. We lived in dosshouses. They were cheap, sad places filled with people broken financially and emotionally. Since we had no food, my mum had me indentured to a seedy off-licence located near our rooming house. At the age of seven, I became a barrow boy and delivered bottles of beer to the down-and-outs who populated our neighbourhood.

My family were nomads. We flitted from one dosshouse to the next, trying to keep ahead of the rent collector. We moved around the slums of Bradford and when we had outstayed our welcome there, we moved on to Sowerby Bridge, before ending up in Halifax. As I grew up, my schooling suffered; I had to work to keep my sister, my mum and half-brothers fed. At the age of ten, I was helping to deliver coal and by my teens, I started work as a grocer’s assistant. At 17, I had been promoted to store manager. However, at the age of 18, the Second World War intervened in whatever else I had planned for the rest of my life. I volunteered to join the RAF.

****

My politics was forged in the slums of Yorkshire but it was in the summer of 1945, at the age of 22, that I finally felt able to exorcise the misery of my early days. In that long ago July, I was a member of the RAF stationed in Hamburg; a city left ruined and derelict by war. I had been a member of the air force since 1941 but my war had been good, because I had walked away from it without needing so much as a plaster for a shaving nick. At its end, my unit had been seconded to be part of the occupational forces charged with rebuilding a German society gutted by Hitler and our bombs.

It was in the palm of that ravaged city that I voted in Britain’s first general election since the war began. As I stood to cast my ballot in the heat of that summer, I joked with my mates, smoked Player’s cigarettes and stopped to look out towards a shattered German skyline. I realised then that this election was momentous because it meant that a common person, like me, had a chance of changing his future.

So it seemed only natural and right that I voted for a political party that saw health care, housing and education as basic human rights for all of its citizens and not just the well-to-do. When I marked my X on the ballot paper, I voted for all those who had died, like my sister, in the workhouse; for men like my father who had been broken beyond repair by the Great Depression; and for women like my mum who had been tortured by grief over a child lost through unjust poverty. And I voted for myself and my right to a fair and decent life.

I voted for Labour and the creation of the welfare state and the NHS, free for all its users. And now, nearly 70 years later, I fear for the future of my grandchildren’s generation, because Britain’s social welfare state is being dismantled brick by brick.

****

My life didn’t really begin until the end of the Second World War. I fell in love with Friede, a German woman, whom I married and brought home to Halifax. My wife gave me emotional stability while the welfare state gave me economic stability. When I was demobbed, I didn’t have many prospects, except using my brawn over my brain. I took factory jobs while my wife and I studied at night school. But I am forever grateful for the foundation of the NHS, because it allowed my wife to receive first-rate treatment for the PTSD she acquired by having witnessed both the atrocities of the Nazis and the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed 50,000 people in three nights of intense RAF bombing in 1943.

My experiences of growing up in Britain before the NHS, when one’s health was determined by one’s wealth, and after 1948, when free health care was seen as a cornerstone for a healthy economy and democracy, convinced me that it was my duty to share my family experiences at this year’s Labour party conference. I agreed to speak about the NHS because I know there are few people left who can remember that brutal time before the welfare state, when life for many was short and cruel. I felt that I owed it to my sister Marion, whose life was cut short by extreme poverty and poor health care, along with all of those other victims of a society that protected the rich and condemned the poor to miserable lives. In many ways, making that speech freed me from the suffering of my youth.

Harry Leslie Smith is the author of a memoir: “Harry’s Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down and What We Can Do to Save it” (Icon Books, £8.99) 

Tax avoidance ‘at the very core’ of firms bidding for major NHS contracts, Unite reveals

Many of the major private health companies bidding for NHS services have tax avoidance measures ‘at the core of their activities’, research from Unite the Union has revealed.

The shocking report exposes ten major health companies including the four biggest private hospital chains in the UK, and Virgin Care and United Healthcare both currently bidding for major clinical contracts.

Tax expert Richard Murphy analysed ten private health firms actively bidding for and running privatised sections of the NHS. The research revealed that all ten make use of tax havens and extremely complex corporate structures to lessen their potential tax bill, while only two pay any significant tax in the UK at all.

Key Findings:

The companies analysed by the research are: Care UK, Circle, General Healthcare Group, HCA, Bio Products Laboratory Holdings, Ramsay Healthcare, Spire Healthcare, The Practice, Optum (United Health) and Virgin Care.

Only two of the 10 companies (HCA and Ramsay) pay any significant tax in the UK because most of the others have structures that involve the payment of significant interest, much of it to offshore companies.

However, all ten companies have links to offshore tax havens, including the Channel Islands, British Virgin Islands and Luxembourg, and all but one employ extremely complex corporate structures to potentially lower their tax bill.

To make matters even worse many of these companies are US companies, or have strong US investment links, which means that the Government could be prevented from taking their NHS contracts back into the public sector unless the NHS is exempted from the trade deal TTIP.Virgin Care, a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Holdings Ltd is revealed to have paid no tax on its last reported profits. Virgin uses 13 intermediate holding companies to distance the firm’s healthcare division from its parent company, based in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

Despite this arrangement Virgin Care provides 30 primary care services across England including GP practices, GP out of hours services, walk-in centres, urgent care centres (UCCs) and minor injury units (MIUs). Virgin is  allowed to bid for a contract worth £280 million in East Staffordshire to treat patients with long term ailments such as diabetes and heart disease.

Similarly Optum UK, a subsidiary of US giant United Healthcare, is bidding for a Staffordshire-based NHS cancer and palliative care contract worth £1.2 billion. Optum has paid zero tax on its reported profits and is linked to tax havens including the Cayman Islands though its parent company.

Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey said: “It’s a national scandal that firms can bid for cancer treatment contracts while scheming how to siphon their profits out of the country into far flung tax havens.

“To make matters even worse many of these companies are US companies, or have strong US investment links, which means that the Government could be prevented from taking their NHS contracts back into the public sector unless the NHS is exempted from the trade deal TTIP.”

“Good government should do everything possible to protect  taxpayer funded public services like the NHS from companies with links to tax havens. But the Tory government’s warped health and social care act has opened up the door to private companies with dubious tax arrangements.

“Despite the NHS being under huge financial strain the Coalition government is behaving like an accomplice to private companies with  tax avoidance structures in place.

Richard Murphy said: “What the structure of many of these businesses shows is that tax planning is at the very core of their activities. This is the wrong priority for companies working in the state funded NHS where the tax contribution everyone makes, including from those who supply NHS services, is vital to the continuing health of the nation.”

Spire Healthcare and General Healthcare Group, both registered in tax havens, received tax credits from HMRC wiping out payments they had made over the previous three years.

Despite these arrangements, none of the companies surveyed have been excluded from bidding for NHS contracts. Since the Health and Social Care Act passed in 2012 billions of pounds worth of NHS services have fallen into private hands. Of the total contracts awarded since April 2013, more than half have gone to non-NHS providers according to the NHS Support Federation.

A new EU-US trade deal, known as TTIP, could prevent the government from cracking down on these practises. Seven of the firms including Virgin and General Healthcare Group have US subsidiaries or investors, potentially allowing them to use the deal to prevent the government blocking their future bids or terminating existing contracts.

For more information or a copy of the research paper contact Ciaran Naidoo on 07768 931 315 or Richard Murphy on 07775 521 797.

 

Quarter of Clinical Commissioning Group board members linked to private healthcare

Over one in four governing members of the Tory designed NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), which have responsibility for a budget of £65 billion, have links to a private company involved in healthcare.

The comprehensive study carried out by Unite, has uncovered how financial interests are ‘running amok’ threatening the trust between GP and patient and the NHS because of the Health and Social Care Act.

The Health and Social Care Act gave CCGs ​ responsibility for commissioning services and in doing so opened the door to conflicts of interest on a massive scale. CCGs are clinically led groups with GP representatives from their geographical area, managers and lay persons.

This is the first comprehensive study of the new NHS commissioners’ external financial interests in private healthcare and proves that vested interests lie at the heart of the government’s Health and Social Care Act.

Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey said: “The Tory designed Health and Social Care Act handed the NHS budget, worth tens of billions, over to Clinical Commissioning Groups and in doing so, created a monster, where personal financial interests run amok.

“As a result our NHS is being privatised and unless David Cameron uses his veto to get the NHS out of the EU-US trade deal TTIP, the government’s sell-off will be irreversible.

“The £3 billion redesign has not only wasted taxpayers’ money and benefitted Tory donors but damaged the very fabric of our NHS. The Health and Social Care Act must be repealed and Cameron must use his veto to get the NHS out of TTIP.”

Dr Ron Singer, chair of the Doctors’ section of Unite said:The Health and Social Care Act forced GPs into a business model that the vast majority did not want.

“Most GPs want to spend their time caring for their patients not tendering out services and being part of a bidding war.

The government’s health act has created opportunities for exploitation by some CCG board members. At the same time some  GPs have decided to become CCG members as a way to defend NHS services from privatisation and fragmentation. 

​“The government’s HSCA is a disaster and is fit for the dustbin of history​.”

Unite looked at the registered interests of 3,392 CCG board members, the most extensive research of these interests undertaken.

Of the 3,392 Board Members, 932 (27%) of CCG board members were found to have a link to a private company involved in healthcare including: 513 Company Directors, 140 business owners, 105 external work, 17 Partners, 15 Chairs, 10 Company Secretaries, 5 CEOs, 1 Trustee, 1 Financial Officer and 125 others including consultants.

The study also found 409 (12%) board members are shareholders in such companies; a combination of businesses they own and external private companies, including providers of ‘Out of Hours Services’.

Come and add your voice to the Save the NHS demo in Leeds on March 28th.