YESTERDAY Health Secretary Hunt insulted the NHS, and NHS workers, and the intelligence of the working class as a whole, when he labelled the NHS an ‘industry’, and compared the greatest gain yet made by the working class, to ‘other industries’.
He said of the NHS, which has saved millions of lives in its over six decades of existence, and is envied by workers outside the UK who are desperate to have a similar life saving service – ‘Other industries have had exactly the same experience of delivering safer service and lower costs at the same time.
‘The airline industry has halved the cost of travel and halved aviation deaths over 30 years. Road deaths have been reduced as new cars have got cheaper and better. And in the public sector, Theresa May’s Home Office has seen crime fall to its lowest ever levels despite a 23 per cent budget cut. Safer services cost less; and controlling costs funds safer services.’ Here, Hunt is telling us that he wants to see NHS costs cut by 50% as well as a 20% plus cut in the NHS budget!
The fact that the life saving expertise in the NHS can involve up to a decade in training to develop counts for nothing. Hunt simply marks down the NHS professional as just another assembly line worker.
So it is to ‘Measured Day Work’ for the NHS, with seven day 24 hour around the clock working for its GPs nurses, consultants and ancillary workers! The lesson of the Mid Staffs NHS disaster, which cost up to a thousand patients lives, is the opposite. The drive for savings and staff cutting to balance the books, to become a Foundation Trust elite hospital, led to people doing jobs that they were not trained to do, and to big staff cuts that resulted in deaths.
Hunt continued in the Daily Telegraph: ‘So it is time to take a long, hard look at whether the NHS spends its resources as carefully as it should. As the Prime Minister set out in his first big speech after the election, the Government has pledged at least £8 billion more to help the NHS’s own plan to transform services, including a truly seven-day operating offer that would cut the unacceptably high mortality rates for those admitted at weekends.
‘Eight billion was what the NHS asked for. But with that commitment from taxpayers, the time for debating whether or not it is enough is over: the NHS now needs to deliver its side of the bargain, which is to make substantial and significant efficiency savings.’ He is demanding further massive cuts and closures of A&E and Maternity departments. He is also providing a cynical cloak to hide what is to happen.
He writes that: ‘To kickstart that process, we have set out a new package of financial controls. We will wrest the initiative away from expensive staffing agencies that have been ripping off our hospitals with their exorbitant rates, and insist nationally negotiated frameworks are used instead, which make use of the NHS’s collective bargaining power.’
The over £20bn of NHS cuts carried out by the Tories led to to massive staff shortages with NHS managers encouraged to bring in ultra-expensive agency workers to plug the huge gaps. This is now to be used to promote further massive cuts by the government that brought in the army of agency workers in the first place. Agency workers are to get the boot along with a large number of full time NHS workers.
Hunt wrote: ‘We know from our tough new inspection regime that the best care is given by regular nurses in stable teams, so it is time to wean the NHS off an understandable but growing addiction to temporary staffing that happened in the wake of Mid Staffs.’
Cynical Hunt writes: ‘We are also introducing new controls on the use of management consultants, so that money is directed to patients rather than bureaucracy. Finally, we are grasping the nettle on excessive executive pay – with new guidelines on directors’ pay to ensure that salaries remain reasonable and fair to more junior staff who have faced pay restraint in recent years.’
The Tories encouraged these large salaries at he same time as they were holding down NHS pay rises to one per cent for some, and facing strike action over the issue. The trade unions must be made to fight the new savage cuts campaign that Hunt is set to launch with a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism. This is the only way forward for the working class and the NHS.