KEIR Starmer and Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday launched a ‘public consultation’ on their plans to transform the NHS from ‘analogue to digital’ in the next ten years.
Starmer and Streeting promised ‘patient passports’ containing individuals’ health data that can be quickly accessed by GPs, hospitals and ambulance services.
This vast database of every person in England Streeting boasted ‘will mean the NHS can work hand in hand with the life sciences sector, offering access to our large and diverse set of data’.
For ‘life sciences sector’ read private tech and private health companies who will welcome the opportunity to harvest all this data for profit.
The Guardian newspaper yesterday reported that medConfidential, a patient privacy campaign group, warned that Streeting’s plans would create a vulnerable database, whose contents could be shared with drug companies and could be viewed by any of the 1.5 million NHS staff, even those not treating the patient.
Sam Smith, a spokesperson for medConfidential said: ‘Wes Streeting is planning a “big brother” data base. Your confidential medical history and all your medical notes will no longer be looked after by doctors and will be controlled by politicians who will decide who they get sold to – which will inevitably be anyone who’ll pay for them.’
Rosa Curling, the co-executive of the technology justice campaign group Foxglove, said: ‘Opening up NHS data to profit-making companies is a fundamental shift in the critical relationship between patient and doctor, which is based above all on confidentiality and trust.’
Of course, the underlying fundamental shift that Streeting and Starmer are planning is the total privatisation of the NHS.
This massive attack on the NHS was announced last month when Starmer launched a report by Lord Darzi on the state of the health service with the threat that the NHS must ‘reform or die’.
Under the last Labour government of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, Darzi was the architect of their attempts to replace GPs with ‘polyclinics’.
That plan was abandoned by the incoming Tory government in the face of massive hostility from workers who found their GP surgeries closed down along with hospital wards, forcing them to travel miles for uncertain appointments at these polyclinics.
Darzi has now emerged as Starmer’s chief advisor on how to close down hospitals and GP surgeries, with polyclinics resurrected under the new name of ‘neighbourhood health centres’.
The third plank of Streeting’s plan is for Smart watches and other wearable technological devices to be given to those suffering from diabetes or high blood pressure so they can monitor their own health at home. The companies making these devices will be ecstatic at the thought of the profit to be made from millions of their watches being bought by the government. The privateers are certainly jumping in on the prospect of leeching more billions from the NHS.
The Telegraph newspaper recently reported that the Independent Healthcare Providers Network (IHPN), which represents private health companies including Bupa, Circle Health Group and Care UK, had written to chancellor Rachel Reeves and Streeting bidding for £1 billion worth of NHS outsourcing, with the promise of building private hospitals to treat patients and charge the NHS.
In practice, these companies would borrow the money from the banks who would be demanding huge returns by charging sky-high interest rates – all of which would come from the NHS budget.
Should any of these companies experience financial difficulties and be unable to make repayments then they will simply close up and move on, pockets already stuffed, while the NHS and working class are left to pick up the bill. This is the future for the NHS under this Labour government.
The NHS is rightly considered to be the greatest gain made by the working class, and today it must be defended by the working class taking action to bring down a Labour government that serves only the interest of the privateers and bankers.
This means demanding the TUC call a general strike to remove the Starmer government and bring in a workers’ government.
This will nationalise the banks and major companies and provide all the resources required by the NHS.
Ending capitalism with the British socialist revolution is the only way forward.