NHS 'Scaremongers' by Ben Cooper

Over the course of the last 18 months I’ve written extensively about the changes taking place in the NHS. I’ve met with activists, healthcare assistants, academics, doctors, nurses, politicians, union members and concerned campaigners from the public.

Whether they are professionals, patients or campaigners, the thing they hold dear between them is a concept, an ideal. That is the preservation of the NHS according to the principles it was founded on in 1948: a public service, for the people, by the people.

This government, which has done so much to damage these principles, denies all charges – instead it dismisses the views of the profession, accusing anyone who criticises it as simply scaremongering.

So I decided to compile a list of quotes from the “scaremongerers”, and let the people speak for themselves. These are from the people I’ve met and have been so helpful to me, or from public figures using their position to fight to keep the principles alive….

“We’re here for the young, the old and the in-betweeners. We need to speak out; our NHS is in dire straits. It’s in a critical condition”. Jill Mountford, Save Lewisham Hospital campaigner

“We must retain this critical public service, and prevent the establishment of a two-tier system, with the best medicine for the wealthy, and an inferior service for the rest.” Stephen Hawking

“Section 75 is the legislation that was dropped in that means that all the GPs working their butts off in the CCGs have to put all the new work out to competitive tender. That basically gives carte blanche for all the big private healthcare companies and private sector to come in and bid for the market. It’s all a smokescreen for this. It’s not a big-bang privatisation of the NHS but bit by little bit they’re picking it off. Trouble with the private sector is they always need to make a profit; if they can’t make a profit they piss off again, so they’ll take over these services, they’ll find they can’t make a 5% profit and they’ll just go again..or they cherry-pick the easy cases”. Dr Philip Hammond, GP and Private Eye’s ‘M.D.’

“What is occurring is an accelerating erosion, and increasingly a reversal, of what the NHS was created to achieve: making health care a right, and no longer something that could be bought or sold”. Dr Allyson Pollock, Professor of public health research and policy

“Where will all of this end? What will be given the greatest priority in a new health care system that sends every service, from blood work to chemotherapy, out to the lowest bid tender? It ends where I began my life – in a Britain that believed health care depended on your social status. So if you were rich and insured you received timely medical treatment, while the rest of the country got the drippings.

“Sometimes I try to think how I might explain to Marion how we built these beautiful structures in our society – which protected the poor, which kept them safe at work, healthy in their lives, supported them when they were down on their luck – only to watch them be destroyed within a few short generations. But I cannot find the words”. Harry Leslie Smith, writer and anti-austerity campaigner – whose sister [Marion] died of tuberculosis in 1926 in a workhouse infirmary

“The NHS is one of the single greatest achievements of any civilisation. [Jeremy Hunt] is killing the NHS so that his owners can bleed you dry. Big, rich, private healthcare companies have donated millions to the Conservative party and now they’re calling in the debt”. Rufus Hound

“Historians will not be kind in their assessment of the coalition government’s record on NHS reform. The first three years were wasted on major organisational changes when the NHS should have been concentrating on growing financial and services pressures. This was a strategic error.” Prof Chris Ham, the King’s Fund’s chief executive

“If we allow market forces to continue to take hold. They will eventually break the NHS apart. Our destination is integration. Markets deliver fragmentation. They bring more providers onto the pitch, increasing the cost and complexity of care”. Andy Burnham

“Cameron’s right. Employers should give workers a pay rise. If only he was in charge of something like the NHS, then he could lead by example”. David Schneider

“NHS reorganisation was our worst mistake in government. [Lansley] kept saying his grand plans had the backing of the medical establishment and we trusted him. In retrospect it was a mistake….Lansley talked unintelligible gobbledygook for half an hour. When he sat down, David Cameron and George Osborne turned to Oliver Letwin and said: ‘Are we sure that this makes sense?’. The Tories’ policy guru nodded sagely, telling his colleagues that it was a brilliant idea to hand the commissioning of healthcare to GPs. And that was that”. Senior Conservative cabinet member MP

“Some £60bn of the NHS budget is now in the hands of clinical commissioning groups, supposedly run by GPs. This is a sham, though one which turns local doctors into human shields for the privatisers. In reality, the vast majority of GPs will keep on doing what they do already – looking after patients – while commissioning will be managed by private companies.

“It is with huge regret that I must say that – however much faith we have – we did not fight to save it. The NHS has been killed, murdered, assassinated by a Tory government. The question now is – do we have enough faith to bring it back to life?” Owen Jones

[Speaking in 2013] “The health service is being restructured onto an insurance compatible footing and the CCGs are technically state-owned insurance schemes.

They’re going to take on around 80% of the NHS budget and they’re going to be parcelling it out to private providers. What’s going to happen on the 1st of April…is finishing the transition away from the original form of funding the NHS and moving into a market system which is going to be full-on market. The public sector will shrink away and the private sector will grow”. Dr Lucy Reynolds

“Like others, I heard David Cameron say “no top-down reorganisation of the NHS”. I was so relieved, because I had lived through 15 reorganisations . . . [But this reform] isn’t so much putting GPs in charge of commissioning, but about dismantling the systems and the architecture of the NHS”. Dr Clare Gerada, former Chair of the Council of the Royal College of GPs

“Private companies are just in it for a quick buck; they don’t care what happens to a hospital long term. They see the NHS budget as an enormous opportunity. We have to put pressure on the Labour Party and make them stand by what they’ve said about reversing privatisation and getting rid of the expensive tendering process which is all in favour of the private companies”. Ursula Holdsworth, retired doctor and NHS campaigner

“This government’s disastrous and wasteful NHS reorganisation has enabled management consultants to cash in on our NHS and siphon off millions that should be spent on patients while hiding behind a cloak of unaccountability”. National Health Action Party statement

“This underlines what the government is actually about, it’s nothing at all to do with restoring the economy, it’s about smashing the public sector…” John Lister co-founder of Keep Our NHS Public

“This [Hinchingbrooke] is exactly what we warned and predicted would happen and illustrates the folly of private sector involvement in our NHS. When the going gets tough, the private sector gets going – and dumps NHS patients. The privatisation experiment has lamentably failed”. Dr Louise Irvine

“[If I were Prime Minister] I would look for every privatised corner of the NHS and take it back into public ownership at once, with no compensation”. Philip Pullman

“Wasteful internal markets, commissioning support units, management consultancy fees, the cost of procurement of clinical services, profit-taking by private providers, the cost of fragmenting pathways due to outsourcing components to private contractors, and PFI deals bankrupting our hospitals; they are draining billions from frontline care in our NHS”. Dr Clive Peedell, NHA Party co-founder

“You can’t run the NHS and expect it to perform if you flush the money out of the system, it just doesn’t work. We see this every day and it’s getting worse”. Kathryn Anderson, nurse at the Royal Free Hospital

“The principles of the NHS aren’t intact. We felt it was our civic duty to bring people’s attention to what’s happening to the NHS. The final straw for us was Clause 119 and the battle for Lewisham before that. If it can happen to one hospital then it can happen to any hospital”. Rehana Azam, organiser of People’s March for the NHS

“I’m on a zero-hours contract. Sometimes I get 40 hours a week, sometimes it’s 15. There’s never any guarantee”. Anonymous health care assistant at privately run hospital

“Clause 119 means no hospital in England is safe. It allows the closure of hospitals if it suits the higher powers and the main reasons may well be financial when it should be a clinically based decision. It’s effectively a hospital closure clause; it’s an affront to democracy.” Dr David Wrigley, GP and BMA GP Committee member

“We would be mad to enforce [the competition regulations] in a way that leaves commissioners spending all their time running competitive processes because they’re terrified they’re going to get into trouble if they don’t”. David Bennett, chief executive of Monitor

“Our department wouldn’t operate without locums; there have been night shifts where I am the only doctor working in A&E who isn’t a locum”. Anonymous A&E doctor

“Chronic underfunding puts massive pressure on A&E, which becomes a hellish place to work. Therefore trainees don’t apply into training programmes, leading to chronic understaffing, further putting pressure on the department so other staff leave”. Tim Crocker-Buque, speciality registrar

“All of this has been aggravated by all the so-called efficiency savings; with £1bn coming out of the primary care budget and the effects of the Health and Social Care Act, the profession has been totally demoralised. The government worships markets. They can’t have it both ways. If they want a market, this is what they get”. Dr Paul Hobday, retired GP and NHA Party PPC

“Competitive tendering absorbs time and money; tenders do not write themselves. NHS commissioners now have a legal duty to use it for all care delivery… Strategic plans and tactical approaches will be the topic of countless away days, asking: Which contracts should we bid for? How far afield geographically should we chase new work? How will we manage the new contracts if we win them? And which tendering partnerships will strengthen our bids, nobble the competition or both

“Already the burden of any qualified provider is stretching NHS provider managers. That workload is about to expand exponentially”. Noel Plumridge, independent consultant and former NHS finance director

“We are seeing people demonstrate their anger in different ways. The dermatology consultants were willing to forfeit their careers to protect care in Nottingham”. Rachael Maskell, head of health, Unite the Union

“People need to challenge media messages using social media. Challenge organisations, such as the Care Quality Commission (CQC) which may be generating ‘bad press’ for political reasons. Encourage opposition politicians to spell out how their policies will protect against specific concerns”. Neil Chadborn, Research Fellow, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham

“The NHS is being turned into a corporate structure modelled on the private sector all across the country. A&E is not profitable, it’s very high risk. A&E units are being shut across the country to focus on the profitable services”. Dr Bob Gill, GP and NHS campaigner

“Our NHS is special the values that inspire are enduring and the public service ethos that underpins it are unique.” Frances O’Grady, chair of the TUC

“I don’t blame the business people for being business people I blame Cameron for allowing them to occupy a position where they can be exerting undue influence to their commercial advantage” Dr Jacky Davis , co-founder of Keep Our NHS Public

“The NHS is really under threat right now, and the public scarcely realise. It’s happening by stealth and piecemeal. Private providers are allowed to hide behind the NHS logo. It’s all going on with absolutely no mandate from electors. In fact we were promised “no top down re-organisation”. It’s one of the biggest deceptions of our time”. Ben Clements, community health nurse

“In Britain they wouldn’t accept the deterioration or the destruction of the health service”.

“If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people”. Tony Benn

“It is not a charity; you are paying for it mainly as taxpayers and it will relieve your money worries in times of illness”. Leaflet published on introduction of the NHS

“So much time goes into creating business models now. We’re seeing services competing with each other, services pitted against each other. I’m spending more and more time and taxpayer money dealing with bureaucracy; it’s not what I wanted to do”. Dr Arun Chopra, psychiatrist and health campaigner

“People should be angry, very angry, about what is happening, but they just haven’t been hearing about it. This needs to change. The National Health Action Party and campaign groups like Keep Our NHS Public are doing a great job, but more people need to be reached. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that if we lose the NHS, my patients will suffer the consequences. I cannot stand by and watch that happen without protesting”. Sarah Hallett, junior doctor

“It was anger and fear that got me involved with campaigning. I was thinking about my children and grandchildren. My grandson is three and a half; he needs hospital treatment but already we’re seeing waiting lists go up. The NHS was created around the time I was born as a public service not a way for private companies to run a profit; I fear that it will not be there for my grandson”. Rosemary Muge, Nottingham KONP chair

“Patients and healthcare workers alike do not want to resist all change. But how do we tell when a change oversteps the mark and becomes a threat to the NHS values that we want to preserve? We think the answer is to set out the principles that make the NHS what it is – the enduring values that we want to see upheld.

Then we intend to keep an eagle eye on the Government to spot when those principles are in danger.” UNISON

“We dragged the National Health Service in 1997 to 2010 from the depths of degradation that the Tories left it in and hoisted it back to the pinnacles of achievement.

The Conservatives fought it then [in 1947]..it’s time that they understood that throughout the whole thing since 1947 people on millionaire’s row have opposed the very essence of the health service” Dennis Skinner

“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”. Aneurin Bevan