sleeping giants! Where have health unions been since '88? Wake up the serted (without a shred of evidence) that improved GP and primary care services could make hospital beds unnecessary.
Tomlinson went on to argue that irrespective of its exceptional health problems, inner London's hospitals should be expected not only to match but to exceed by almost 50% the "throughput" of the most efficient hospitals anywhere in His "target figures' for the use of hospital beds, again invented without any supporting evidence, are being widely touted by desperate health chiefs seeking to save money by closing hospitals.
In reality, treating patients is still expensive, and in the wacky logic of the new NHS market, it is cash limits and not patient care which is the top priority. So we find Trusts are being penalClare Rayner. across the country. nothing.
non-urgent operations for two months - unless they come from fund-holding GPs. • Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital, facing a deficit of £6 million, is axing 300 jobs. • Liverpool's Broadgreen Hospital, whose and a theatre suite to save money. ised for treating too many patrentol Already the market system is creating a crop of avoidable tragedies. Three patients from Greater Manchester, aged 50, 62 and 40, have died within a week because of a lack of intensive care beds. They were transferred 50 miles by ambulance to Blackpool, not to vacant beds in nearby Liverpool because their health authority had no contract with Liverpool! The crisis-ridden Ealing Hospital Trust, which hit the IT IS FIVE years since the TUC last called on health workers and campaigners to join a national demonstration for the NHS - and then had the nerve to offer a platform of speakers devoid of health workers, and headed by 'Agony Aunt' Even that demonstration was only grudgingly called, under pressure from a mass movement of nurses which began in January 1988 with strikes in Manchester and spread In 1989, a much more limited demonstration was called in support of the ambulance pay dispute, but then..
There was no demonstration or TUC campaign against the NHS & Community Care Act which introduced the controversial 'market' system and opted casualty unit faces closure, is closing three wards headlines recently when its Chief Executive suddenly publicised the plight of patients forced to spend the night on trolleys in the corridor, has since announced it can only accept. "blue light' emergencies. Meanwhile, Rosie Faunch, after her day of glory in the press as Ealing's Chief Executive with a conscience, (or 'the fart with a heart, as one health worker described her) has opted out of the NHS - and taken a job running a plush private hospital in Windsor. out Trusts to the NHS from April 1991.
There was no challenge to the introduction of the Community Care reforms, which in April of this year removed the long-term care of the elderly from the NHS, making patients liable to means- tested charges.
It has appeared that in many areas the health unions have completely given up the ghost, allowing dozens of Trust bosses carte blanche to carry through brutal cuts in beds and services, a massacre of jobs, a two-year virtual pay freeze, and fresh rounds of privatisation. Fightbacks have been few and far between.
Health unions have merged to become bigger, but so far show little sign of increased strength or militant activity. The biggest of the sleeping giants, UNISON with 500,000 members, can point only to the courageous fight this summer at London's
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK LIBERATION supplement, November 13 1993