THE NATIONAL Health Service enters its 50%h anniversary year facing one of the worst financial crises in its history. Although the predicted "winter crisis" appears to have melted away in the relatively mild weather and without the usual flu epidemic, waiting lists are soaring and even bigger problems are being stored UP Labour's imposition of Tory cash limits means that health authorities and Trusts have to cut spending by almost £500 million in the next 15 months -and the position continues to deteriorate.
Many local Trusts are facing multi-million pound deficits, with the Royal Hospitals Trust in east London leading the pack, seeking to axe 200 jobs as it wrestles with a £14m shortfall.
Other Trusts, most of them already reduced to little more than an emergency-only service, are cutting jobs and services, while health authorities scale down contracts and look for bed closures to balance the books.
North Essex, which has gained an extra £20m real terms spending power in the last 3 years, still requires cuts of over f6m, and has opted to close 70 beds in community hospitals. Community beds are also the main target for closures in Lincolnshire, where the deficit is £4m. 80 beds could go, creating huge logistical problems for patients and visitors in one of England's largest counties.
Prison
South Essex, which has enjoyed generous increases in funding, looking to cut a massive £9.8m in 1998-9, including a mean-spirited £90,000 cut in liaison services for mentally disordered offenders which the health authority admits will result in more people being inappropriately jailed rather than receiving treatment.
West Hertfordshire, facing a £12m shortfall, is floating plans to turn either Watford General or Hemel Hempstead Hospital into a "community hospital" - with no beds! A vigorous campaign of resistance is being led by UNISON.
12noon - 4.30 ULU, Malet St, London WC1 Called by Welfare State Network Speakers include Tony Benn MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Geoff Martin (London convenor UNISON), John Lister (London Health Emergency) Details from WSN c/o Camden People's Centre, 183 Queen's Crescent London NW5 4DS. 0171-639-5068 resolved question over the future of hospital services in London. With the Tory axe still chopping away at services at Guy's Hospital and Queen Mary's, Roehampton, and with Bart's Hospital facing extinction, the independent review set up by Health Minister Alan Milburn submitted its report at the end of October, but this has been followed by a constipated silence.
It is believed that the panel came to the conclusion that too many beds had already closed in London's hospitals, leaving the capital up to 1,000 beds short of the required provision - not the message the government wished to hear.
Rubber stamp
As we go to press the report, and the government response to it seem likely to be published in early February. Despite the bed shortage, it is believed that the de facto closures of Guy's and Queen MaBart's closure will be rubberstamped, on the assumption that a new £200m hospital will be built with private finance on the Royal London Hospital site in Whitechapel.
If this is the case, the net result of Labour's first year in charge of the NHS will be to maintain every significant element of Tory policy.
In fact Labour's policy is even more Tory than the Tories - since they have embarked on a ruinously expensive programme of hospital building under the Private Finance Initiative, which is set to shovel profits into the coffers of private banks, building firms and service contractors for a minimum of 30 years and up to 60 years.
So keen has Labour become on the private sector that the celebrations for the 50°° birthday of the NHS are to be sponsored by private health insurance companies including Norwich Union (which makes profitable use of NHS pay. Protestors rally to defend Queen Mary's Hospital, Roehampton, where key services have been axed during Labour's "moratorium" on closures beds) and possibly BUPA. Drug companies, which also coin millions each year from the NHS will also be urged to participate.
Nothing could better sum up the prostration of national union leaders than the absence of any plans for the labour movement to celebrate the NHS Anniversary: instead union bureaucrats will be sitting down with NHS bosses and the RCN to plan feeble jamborees -while cash cutting redundancy and closure plans are forced through which sack front-line NHS staff.
Pathetic plans so far unveiled by Health Secretary Frank Dobson to mark "50 golden years of the NHS" include a "health village at the annual Lincolnshire agricultural show", "publication of a book in Barnsley", and an orgy of bible-bashing and religious mumbo-jumbo, with church and cathedral services, including one in Leicester "with a sermon by Health Minister Paul Boateng".
Now that's what we call radical!