LORELY LISTENS - SOLIHULL TIMES

Published on Wed 2nd Aug 2006

Is our health service being privatised by stealth? That's a question which is exercising many minds at the moment, not least of whom are Solihull Pensioners' Convention which I attended last week.

Pensioners get passionately steamed up about some things, and the pensioners of Solihull are a force to be reckoned with. Their latest worry is the government announcement that they intend to press ahead with a second wave of privately run treatment centres for NHS patients.

Now we all want the shortest possible wait for treatment and choice is a good thing, so what's the problem?

The problem is that creaming off the easiest operations into private hands, paying them more for doing it, then leaving the NHS to pick up the pieces when things go wrong, train the staff and do all the difficult work creates an uneven playing field.

This government has introduced a market model into the NHS, making hospitals compete for patients, imposing targets and micro managing from the centre instead of letting doctors and nurses make decisions and running their own hospitals.

Hospitals which don't fit into these tight constraints and overspend their budgets are forced to cut operations, beds, wards, and even close. MPs throughout the country are up in arms on behalf of their own local hospitals which face unacceptable cuts.

But is the government bothered? They have a shiny new toy called treatment centres which they hope will make everything better.

Back at the Pensioners Convention, one chap related a story about private outsourcing of children's treatment which had then been used as justification for closing a children's ward because there was insufficient demand! Is this privatisation by the back door?

The government have apparently commissioned (at great expense of course) American consultants to come in and advise on how the Health Service should be run. If we could be so foolish as to adopt the American model of health provision we can kiss goodbye to the NHS as we know it.