NHS England goes…

 

...in a reform of the health service that they say will cut bureaucracy and save money that will be better spent in delivering front-line services to the frail and infirm. Sir Keir Starmer said “I don’t see why decisions about £200 billion of taxpayer money on something as fundamental to our security as the NHS should be taken by an arm’s length body, NHS England. And I can’t, in all honesty, explain to the British people why they should spend their money on two layers of bureaucracy. That money could and should be spent on nurses, doctors, operations, GP appointments. So I’m bringing management of the NHS back into democratic control by abolishing NHS England. That will put the NHS back at the heart of government where it belongs, free it to focus on patients — less bureaucracy with more money for nurses”. Whether that actually happens when the NHS returns directly to the “democratic control” of the Department of Health and Social Care is, of course, a matter of opinion.
Hugh Alderwick, the Director of Policy at the Health Foundation, said “Abolishing NHS England is a watershed moment in how the English NHS is governed and managed – and ends a 12-year experiment with trying to manage the NHS more independently from ministers.
“There is some logic in bringing the workings of NHS England and the government more closely together – for example, to help provide clarity to the health service on priorities for improvement. And – in reality – it is impossible to take politics out of the NHS.
“But history tells us that rejigging NHS organisations is hugely distracting and rarely delivers the benefits politicians expect. Scrapping NHS England completely will cause disruption and divert time and energy of senior leaders at a time when attention should be focused on improving care for patients”.
The unions were equally unimpressed. PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said “technology has a part to play in improving public services and enhancing our members’ job satisfaction, but we are also clear that it cannot be used as a blunt instrument to cut jobs. Better public services and better front-line delivery will require human beings making empathetic decisions, not automatons incapable of understanding people’s needs”.
Only time will tell whether this will end the shameful sight of patients left for days in hospital corridors due to the shortage of beds or better pay for nurses and the other medical staff that keep the NHS going. What is certain is that around 9,000 jobs will be axed at NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care as part of the changes – and that is largely what lies behind the Prime Minister’s decision.

Hospital workers stand for Gaza!

by New Worker correspondent

NHS workers held a moment of silence in memory of their colleagues killed during the brutal Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at a solidarity picket outside St Thomas’ Hospital in central London on Tuesday. Hospital staff and Palestinian solidarity activists called for an urgent and permanent cease-fire to end the slaughter of defenceless civilians that has already claimed the lives of over 11,000 Palestinian Arabs during the Israeli invasion. 

The NHS 75 years on

The National Health Service marked it 75th anniversary this week. But while the tributes pour in striking nurses, doctors and ancillary workers, overcrowded surgeries and long hospital waiting lists tell another story.
The NHS embodied the hopes and dreams of the labour movement whose campaign for free medical treatment for the masses cumulated in the opening of the health service on 5th July 1948.
A National Health Service, delivered free to all at the time of need, is an essential requirement if people are to play an active part in society.
The expectation of the working class in the post‑war period for some dramatic changes to their lives resulted in the birth of the NHS, under the post‑war Labour Government. The NHS was revered throughout the capitalist world.
It came with a price. The consultants demanded the continuation of privately paid healthcare, alongside their services to the NHS. Their demands were met.
The wealthy continued to receive their personalised healthcare; the consultants were able to continue to receive lucrative payment for this private business.
The idea of making profit from the sick continued and the NHS would be viewed by capitalists as a valuable asset later as the conditions changed.
Though the NHS was built with public taxation it was later opened up for capitalist exploitation.
The introduction of private healthcare insurance enabled the private sector to grow. Companies could use it as part of a salary package to some top employees. Others paid privately for health insurance, and later some would pay out of savings to get an earlier consultation and then have quicker access to the NHS, as waiting lists grew.
All public bodies were encouraged to obtain private finance to pay for major projects like hospitals with no exception. New hospitals were built and leased back. The conditions were set by the financiers. Rates were set for an agreed period, and then the financiers could increase their charges. This led to hospitals becoming more indebted and vulnerable to private take over.
Nevertheless the NHS has continued to serve the people through preventative medicine and medical research. Large-scale vaccination programmes protected children from whooping cough, measles and tuberculosis and more recently helped quell the Covid pandemic that threatened to bring the country to its knees in 2020. The NHS has also pioneered new treatments like Britain’s first kidney transplant in 1960 and Europe’s first liver transplant in 1968 and advanced medical research such as bionic eyes and the world’s first rapid whole genome sequencing service for seriously ill babies and children.
This week we’ve had the usual tributes from bourgeois politicians of all hues whose platitudes mask the fact that Starmer’s Labour Party looks on the Sunak government’s butchery of the NHS with the tacit approval  that allows the Tories to continue to privatise the already seriously under-funded health service.
Capitalists view health as a commodity. We, however. regard a National Health Service as a cornerstone to our society, to treat all, when needed, paid through a fair taxation system, to give good after‑care, to prevent the spread of disease and encourage and promote a healthy lifestyle. A good NHS is essential for a healthy population and essential to a socialist society and socialist economy.

Health is not a commodity!

Secret plans to withdraw hospital care from the over-70s in the case of a catastrophic pandemic have come out this week. According to revelations in the mainstream media elderly people would be denied treatment to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed during a health crisis. Instead they would be placed on an “end of life pathway” reminiscent of the euphemisms used by the death doctors of the Third Reich to justify the “mercy killing” of those the Nazis deemed unfit to live.
     The strategy, drawn up in 2017 and 2018, reportedly stipulated that in a “severe” flu pandemic, the health secretary could authorise medics to prioritise some patients over others with people in nursing homes offered “end of life pathways” instead of medical assistance. Under the plan, the triaging process would be based on patients' “probability of survival” rather than clinical need.
    The Government says the proposals related to “hypothetical scenarios” and claim they were never adopted as official policy. But Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams claims that Britain had come “perilously close” to an approach of this sort at the height of the pandemic last year.
    The Johnson government was slow to take action from the very start clearly embracing the crackpot do-nothing “herd immunity” theory that was followed by the Trump administration in the USA and the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil with disastrous consequences for millions of people left defenceless against the coronavirus plague. Though the Government did eventually yield to scientific pressure to bring in the national lockdowns that curbed the plague before the vaccines were developed some 42,000 elderly people died from Covid in care homes -- largely spread by infected arrivals discharged from hospitals to free up beds,
    Dominic Cummings maintains it is “complete nonsense” to say that the government “put a shield around care homes”. According to Johnson’s embittered former guru “the opposite happened” as the NHS “sent people with Covid back to care homes”.
    There’s going to be an independent public inquiry into the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s not going to start its proceedings until the spring of next year. We can’t wait that long.
    Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, called for a people’s inquiry into Covid. It’s already begun with the Keep Our NHS Public campaign.
    Chaired by the human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield QC, the people’s inquiry has held nine sessions gathering evidence from expert witnesses, key workers, patients, and bereaved people. The People’s Covid Inquiry has recently published interim recommendations and it is expected to publish its final report and recommendations in the autumn.
    In the meantime it has concluded that the delay in recognising the gravity of the situation was caused by a failure of leadership and the deaths of 150,000 people, most of whom died needlessly, have been the result of incompetence. Timings of lockdowns and failure to put in place travel restrictions and quarantine contributed significantly to accelerating the spread of Covid.
    We want a health service that is free at the point of need. The service and the morale of its workers must be reinstated to the full, to guarantee the sick, young and elderly, receive the treatment and service needed, including dental, fully supported by our tax system and at no extra cost to the patients and their families. It is the workers who create the wealth by their toil and provide the funding in the form of taxes, not the bourgeoisie, who live off the backs of the workers. We will continue to fight to save our services.
    A national health service, delivered free to all at the time of need, is an essential requirement if people are to play an active part in society. The capitalists view health as a commodity. We do not.

Pay the Nurses, fund the NHS

Nurses are gearing up for a “summer of action” over pay following the Government’s derisory three per cent award that the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said amounts to a cut after inflation is taken into account. The RCN is organising demonstrations across the country and a consultative pay ballot in the run-up to its annual conference in September. Unison and the British Medical Association (BMA) are sounding out their members on future industrial action for higher pay.
    Whilst the Tories bleat that their award is higher than the initial one per cent they offered in March, it is still well short of the 12.5 per cent demand from nursing staff or the similar demands of the GMB and Unite, who also organise workers in the health sector.
    Prime Minister Boris Johnson came under attack this week after he tried to dodge being 'pinged' for self-isolation – a day after announcing that so-called vaccine passports would be required for entry to nightclubs, concerts and other large public events from September.
    Meanwhile the knives are out for Johnson following a Tory dip in the opinion polls, which his rivals say is down to Johnson’s incompetent handling of the lockdown lifting. The latest YouGov poll put the Tories down six points to 38 per cent last week, just four points over Labour, whilst the minor parties – the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – also gained three points at the expense of the Conservatives. On this basis a general election would produce a hung parliament dependent on the whims of the Scottish nationalists and Northern Ireland’s unionist parties.
    Some Tory backbenchers say that momentum is growing to ditch Johnson in favour of his Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. But this may be premature. Sunak is undoubtedly a very ambitious man – but he probably still needs a few more years in high office before reaching out for the premiership and he certainly needs to reach some sort of understanding with the Remainer grandees to secure a seamless succession.
    This should be a golden opportunity for Labour to regain lost ground by backing the health workers to the hilt. The Corbynistas have pledged full support. But all we’ve got from Sir Keir Starmer are some mealy-mouthed words about fair pay for nurses. Starmer said the three per cent offer was “not fair” – but he refuses to endorse the union claims or to say what he thinks would be “fair”.
    Millions of working people are eternally grateful for the dedication and sacrifice of the health service workers who are on the front-line in the battle against the coronavirus plague. Opinion polls show that most of them support the nurses’ demands. But far from heeding the voices on the street, Starmer would rather go down the road of the Blairites and Zionists to pursue pointless vendettas against tiny Trotskyist sects in the mistaken belief that this will give him some street-cred with northern workers and chalk-up some more brownie points with what is perceived to be the dominant wing of the ruling class.
    The entire labour movement needs to close ranks around the NHS workers’ pay campaign to force the Government to respond realistically to their just demands and to provide concrete solidarity if they are forced to take industrial action later in the year.

Defending Imperialism

Sir Keir Starmer says “Labour’s foreign policy will always be rooted in our values”. He tells the Fabian Society’s New Year conference that “we’re proudly patriotic. And we’re proudly internationalist too. I believe that after a decade of global retreat Britain needs to be a far stronger and more confident voice on the international stage”. Brave words right out of the Blairite stable that includes the entire lexicon of imperialism’s “human rights” gang as well as the “ethical foreign policy” of former foreign minister, Robin Cook. But what does all this guff actually mean?
    Very little beyond following the twists and turns of the ruling circles in Britain and the United States that have launched a new “America’s Back” propaganda drive to justify a new NATO offensive to restore imperialist hegemony throughout the Third World.
    After the Second World War a much weakened Britain sheltered behind the American eagle in a “special relationship” that the ruling class believed would defend their global imperialist interests. At the same time they tried to play off a renascent Europe against the USA. This trans-Atlantic bridge between Franco-German and American imperialism was the basis of post-war British foreign policy until the Blair era.
    Now Starmer talks about Britain “once again being the bridge between the US and the rest of Europe”. But Tony Blair burnt that bridge when he broke with France and Germany to fully support the Americans in the first Gulf war.

Defending the NHS

The media frenzy around latest rift between the Queen and her wayward son, Prince Harry and the subsequent departure of Piers Morgan from his presenting role on ITV's popular Good Morning Britain show following controversial comments he made about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex has conveniently enabled the bourgeois media to, once again, push the derisory NHS pay rise on to the back burner.
    Labour has, for sure, renewed its attack on the government’s one per cent pay offer, calling it “reprehensible” and claiming that a 2.1 per cent rise had previously been budgeted in the Government’s long term plan for the health service.
    Shadow Secretary of State, Lisa Nandy, rightly told the media:: "The government, to be clear, is not planning a pay rise ... that is a real-terms pay cut because it doesn’t keep up with inflation and for nurses to be offered a pay cut is just reprehensible in our view”.
    Labour constantly reminds us that the NHS was the jewel in the crown of the tranche of social-democratic reforms passed by the post-war Attlee government. But harping on about past glories is no substitute for serious campaigning. The Starmer leadership needs to do much more than this if it seriously hopes to regain the trust of millions of working-class voters that abandoned the Labour Party over Brexit at the last election.

Getting to grips with the crisis

The news that the Health Minister has gone down with coronavirus is a sign that the virus has now reached out to the corridors of power in Westminster. By Tuesday the number of cases in the UK reached 382, a rise of 63 from the previous day, with a sixth person confirmed to have died after contracting the virus also known as COVID-19.

Whether this will inject a new sense of urgency into the Johnson government remains to be seen. Last week’s bumbling press conference in which Boris Johnson told us how to wash our hands followed by more confused ramblings on ITV’s This Morning show have not inspired confidence amongst the elderly and the infirm, who are most at risk from the COVID-19 virus.

The Government’s response to the crisis was unveiled in the Budget this week. But abolishing business rates for small firms in England, extending sick pay and increased NHS funding only goes part of the way to tackling the escalating threat of a devastating epidemic that could overwhelm the health service and seriously undermine the economy at the same time.

Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell says that 10 years of “cuts, weak growth and widespread insecure work” have left the UK in a “vulnerable position” to a shock such as the one the country now faces. Government spending is “nowhere near the scale we need” he says and after “10 years of austerity… we’ve got inequality and poverty that we’ve not seen on a scale in this country”.

Labour points out that NHS trusts ended the last financial year with a combined deficit of £827 million, excluding £256 million of exceptional technical adjustments due to the collapse of Carillion, whilst clinical commissioning groups had a debt of £150 million. Trusts are now increasingly relying on loans from the Department of Health, which they are unlikely ever to repay.

Labour has highlighted the dismal state of our hospitals today. Since 2010, 17,000 NHS beds have been cut and one in 12 health service posts in England is unfilled. Some 214,000 people, one in four patients, left waiting on trolleys for over four hours last year – the second worst performance on record  – and over 11 per cent of ambulances left waiting over 30 minutes to deliver patients to hospital. More than 5,000 hospital patients spent over 12 hours in A&E over the acute Christmas period last December; 678 urgent operations were cancelled between January and February last year, and 4.3 million people are now on waiting lists awaiting treatment.

Communists believe that the National Health Service is a cornerstone to our society, to treat all, when needed, paid through a fair taxation system, to give good after-care, to prevent the spread of disease, and encourage and promote a healthy lifestyle. A good NHS is essential for a healthy population, and essential to a socialist society and socialist economy.

Short-term measures, ‘hardship funds’ and tax breaks for small shops are not going to keep coronavirus at bay. We need to follow the Chinese example that the Italians are now following, to stop the virus in its tracks. The NHS needs massive injections of funds to fill the vacancies at all levels and recruit the health workers needed to deal with the current crisis.

John McDonnell says the coronavirus threat has “exposed the social emergency” Britain faces and said that “someone needs to get a grip”. Sadly, but not surprisingly, there’s no “someone” who fits the bill in the current government.

Learn from China

 Boris Johnson has, somewhat belatedly, responded to the coronavirus threat by convening the COBRA emergency committee which drew up a “battle plan” to deal with a potential pandemic in Britain. Most of it is common sense including calling up newly-retired doctors and nurses to help if the outbreak spreads. Other measures being considered include encouraging home working, relaxing pupil-teacher ratios in schools and the possible cancellation of major sporting events.

            But the best thing that the Government can do is to study the Chinese experience and try to apply their methods in dealing with the possible spread of the virus throughout the country. The virus first appeared in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China, in December. It rapidly spread across other parts of the country. The people’s government responded with lock-downs, quarantines and the mass mobilisation of the medical services including the speedy construction of new hospitals to deal with the crisis. People’s China’s comprehensive, rigorous and thorough-going prevention and control measures have now contained the spread of the epidemic and the positive trend in the prevention and control work is expanding. Over 33,000 people have recovered in Hubei and they now outnumber existing confirmed cases for the first time.

By taking these strong measures the people’s government is doing its very best to ensure the health of the Chinese people and also working together with the World Health Organisation and other countries to safeguard global public health security. This is what communist leadership and a planned economy can do in times of crisis.

No one expects Britain to do the same. Successive Tory governments have starved the national health service of funds needed to maintain our hospitals to the standards that one would expect from a country whose economy is still the fifth largest in the world.

Dr Rinesh Parmar, the chair of the Doctors' Association UK (DAUK) campaigning group, says that an outbreak of coronavirus could cripple the health service.

A recent DAUK survey showed that many doctors fear the NHS is not well prepared to deal with a major outbreak of coronavirus.

More than 99 per cent of 1,618 NHS front-line medics questioned did not agree with the assurances given by Boris Johnson that the service will cope if it is hit by a surge in the number of people falling ill.

They believe the health service is already stretched with too few intensive care beds and GP surgeries that are struggling to meet patient demand.

 “The truth is the NHS has already been brought to its knees and many doctors fear that our health system simply won’t cope in the event of influx of coronavirus patients,” Dr Parmar said.

“With nearly 10,000 doctor vacancies and 43,000 nurse vacancies [in England] the NHS is already understaffed to deal with demand. A&E waiting times are the worst on record. Intensive care units are at capacity and are even struggling to admit patients who are critically unwell or awaiting cancer surgery”.

But there are certain things the Government can do. Pumping money into the health service to recruit the health workers needed to cope with the crisis would be a good start. Crash building of emergency hospitals along with emergency legislation to give every worker the right to statutory sick pay from the first day of absence to cover going into quarantine or self-isolation to prevent the further spread of the virus is another.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, says the issue of zero hours contracts needs to be addressed, so that those who fall ill can take time off in order to self- isolate. Nearly two million workers do not qualify for statutory sick pay, including 1 in 10 working women and 23 per cent of zero-hours contract workers. .

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