Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS medical director, has said that private companies will be asked to carry out routine operations to relieve pressure on hospitals ‘when the going gets rough in winter’.
NHS managers have already been warned that emergency services are on a knife-edge, while Dame Barbary Hakin, NHS England’s deputy chief executive, has already talked to private companies about the possibility of them providing ‘spare capacity’ to help the service deal with the expected surge in the number of patients in the event of very cold weather.
Keogh has told a House of Commons Health Select Committee: ‘We’ve started to look at how the private sector might be engaged in the event of a surge through hospitals, coming through A&E.
‘One of the issues under consideration is when the going gets rough in winter, often one of the impacts is on elective care, so waiting lists start to drift out, so could more elective care be shifted into the private sector?’
Private firms are to be brought in to handle routine operations. This is just the start. Keogh admitted that Hakin ‘has had meetings not only with the private sector but with the voluntary sector to see what they could do to help’ if the NHS found itself struggling.
An NHS spokesman also admitted that this could mean any of the 211 GP-led clinical commissioning groups in England outsourcing cataract removals or hip or knee replacements to a private firm, and that contracts would be signed with them.
The NHS Confederation told the MPs Committee: ‘It is clear from our members that urgent and emergency care is on a knife-edge. There are considerable concerns about a lack of capacity in the system to respond to a sudden increase in demand for care.
‘For example, while this winter has so far been relatively mild, our members are concerned about the consequences of any sustained drop in temperatures.
‘Our members continue to express serious concerns about lack of capacity, particularly in terms of staffing. Many expressed the view that urgent and emergency care is on a knife-edge.’
The truth of the matter is that the NHS is already being cut, closed and privatised.
The cuts will amount to £20bn by 2015, while up and down the country A&E departments and hospitals are being closed with nothing to replace them with devastating results. Keogh is just anticipating the mass of cuts and closures to come by getting the private and even the voluntary sectors involved, ready to take over what is left of the NHS.
The fact is that the government is pushing through legal changes in the House of Commons that will allow it to arbitrarily close as many A&Es or NHS hospitals as it likes.
There is a deadly price to be paid for this. The Chase Farm A&E was shut down on December 9th, with police mobilised to make sure that it could not be occupied to keep it open.
The propaganda line was that patients could go to the already overcrowded Barnet hospital, at no cost to their health and well being, while an Urgent Care Centre would remain at Chase Farm.
On 15th of January at 3am in the morning a mother brought her three year old child to the Chase Farm Urgent Care Centre to find it locked, bolted and empty.
Eventually she found a nurse, who found an ambulance to take the child to Barnet. Muhammad Hashir was pronounced dead at 4am after 45 minutes were spent in an attempt to resuscitate!
Residents of Enfield are livid with anger and are demanding quite rightly that their A&E be reopened.
Nevertheless as Keogh’s statement shows, the cuts and closure campaign is gathering pace, with private contracts being given out for routine surgery while the NHS is being shut down.
Now is the time to put a stop to the butchery of the NHS to fatten the privateers, before the privatisation drive creates a mountain of corpses.
Trade unions in Enfield must demand that their A&E is reopened at once.
Trade unions nationally must take action to halt the privatisation of the NHS.
They must occupy all hospitals threatened with closure and call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.