THE long awaited public inquiry into the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust opened yesterday.
It was in Mid-Staffs hospital that between 2005 and 2008 an estimated 400 patients died needlessly after receiving treatment there.
Earlier investigations into this appalling death rate pinned the blame squarely on staff shortages, especially amongst nurses, in order to cut some £10m so that the hospital could become a Foundation Trust.
The savage staff cuts, dictated by Labour government policy, led to instances where unqualified receptionists in the A&E department were making patient diagnoses.
On the same day that the inquiry opened, Unison, the largest health sector union, issued a stark warning that current staff shortages, recruitment freezes and redundancies will ‘turn back the clock’ on patient care throughout the NHS.
A Unison survey of 8,000 NHS staff found that half were facing staff shortages, four-fifths reported increased workloads, and a third stated that patient care had declined.
All this as a result of the cuts being imposed by the Coalition government which is demanding £20 billion of ‘savings’ by 2014.
While the Tory-led Coalition boasts that it has ring-fenced the NHS, the fact is that health primary trusts are restricting patient access to treatment to save money, while one-fifth of NHS hospitals in England admit to closing or considering closing A&E and Maternity units since the election.
What is clear is that Mid-Staffordshire is not some unfortunate, isolated incident in the past caused by a financially deranged management, it represents the future of the National Health Service today – if those who want to destroy the NHS and the Welfare State have their way.
When Unison speaks of the cuts turning the clock back, what they are talking about is health care being driven back to the days before the NHS, when the most advanced medical treatment was restricted to those who could pay.
Both Labour and the Coalition claim that the real cause of the funding crisis in the NHS is the increase in people’s lifespan and the development of new, expensive treatments.
In any civilised society such advances would be hailed as enormously progressive, but under capitalism the prolonging of human life and scientific breakthroughs in health care are viewed as an unsupportable drain on the capitalists’ profits.
The question also has to be posed: what is Unison going to do about the crisis which they have so carefully detailed?
So far, the only response of Unison has been restricted to futile attempts to use the bourgeois courts to declare the cuts illegal, and to lobby the party conferences of the Coalition begging them to change their minds.
Restricting the defence of the NHS to the law courts and appeals to Tories is a complete betrayal by the leadership of Unison and every other public sector union.
The NHS was not a gift from the capitalist class, it was a concession forced out of them by a working class in the 1940s determined not to return to the days of private health, where workers were expected to live only as long as they could work.
It can only be defended today by the removal of leaders who will not fight, and replacing them with a leadership prepared to use the full strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the government and replace it with a workers government that will nationalise the pharmaceutical industries and take profit out of health.
If capitalism can no longer afford a health system free at point of delivery, then it is capitalism that deserves to be destroyed not the NHS.