TOMORROW Central Surrey Health (CSH), a private company set up by nurses and therapists, will find out whether they have won the £22m contract to provide community care services for Surrey Health Authority.
It is a scandal that nurses have to form a private company in order to keep their jobs and continue to provide services to NHS patients.
What is happening in most places is that huge multinational healthcare corporations are moving in to take over Primary Care Trusts’ (PCTs) commissioning, NHS community services, GP services, imaging services and carrying out operations, normally done in NHS hospitals, in treatment centres and mobile units.
These profiteers, who are being brought into the NHS by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Labour government, have no intention of maintaining NHS national terms and conditions of employment.
They want cheap labour. In fact, in order to cut costs and boost profits, US and South African companies will find ways of replacing doctors with nurses and nurses with unqualified healthcare assistants, in carrying out work to maximise profits.
At every turn the Labour government and Department of Health are giving millions to these corporations, which have made huge profits and prospered by selling their healthcare packages to the rich, white elite in South Africa, or by making millions from the health insurance business in the US.
On Thursday, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt outlined plans for nurses to prescribe drugs, unsupervised by a medically-trained doctor. They will not have the six-year training of a doctor, but only three years nursing training and a 38-day course on prescribing drugs.
Hewitt also published a White Paper on Community Care which would require GP surgeries to be open from 8am until 8pm. To provide cover, substitute non-medical ‘healthcare practitioners’ will be used by the profit-driven companies that will take over running GP services.
It has also been reported that a senior advisor in the Scottish NHS has been looking into pathology tests being carried out by the private company SRL-Ranbaxy and Fortis Healthcare – in India!
The anarchy of the capitalist, profit-driven market is already ripping apart the NHS, destroying it and putting it in the hands of the profiteers.
Low paid workers have been priced out of getting the medicines they need because of the price of prescriptions and the cost of NHS dental care is 80 per cent of the private price, if you can find an NHS dentist.
Several hundred hospitals are already owned by property speculators as a result of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes, and ancillary staff are forced to work for contractors, who cut corners to maximise profits.
This is just the beginning. Last Thursday, immediately after his defeat on the anti-terrorism laws and its 90-day detention provision, Blair declared he is going to forge ahead with his privatisation of education and the NHS.
There will be a Bill presented on education, but the government can press ahead with the privatisation of the NHS under present legislation.
The latest moves against the NHS, such as the privatisation of PCTs, implementing ‘payment by results’ and handing over Community Care to private companies, have been carried out through edicts from Hewitt’s Department of Health.
Blair and Hewitt are defying the votes taken at the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party conferences in opposition to the privatisation of the NHS, so nobody should be surprised if they don’t have a vote in Parliament.
Blair has made clear that he favours unelected police chiefs making decisions about anti-terror laws, so why not let the healthcare corporations decide what will happen to the NHS?!.
Healthworkers and all workers in the trade unions must not allow themselves to be caught off guard, waiting for a vote in Parliament which may never come.
Before it is too late, every trade unionist, particularly those in the NHS, must campaign immediately to force their leaders to organise mass strike action to stop any further privatisation and kick the privateers out of the NHS.
Those leaders of the unions who refuse to fight to defend the NHS must be replaced by those who will organise for a general strike to bring down the Blair regime and replace it with a workers’ government that will restore the NHS.
