the Health and Social Care Act, which came into force yesterday, ‘is the privatisation of the National Health Service and must be defeated through class action, a general strike, to remove this government,’ leading BMA member Anna Athow said yesterday.
Under the Act, the responsibility of the Secretary of State for health to provide universal comprehensive health services free at the point of use, is now gone.
Commissioning of healthcare has been removed from the Primary Care Trusts, which were abolished yesterday, and is now taken over by the NHS Commissioning Board (NCB) and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).
The NCB has to ensure that the provision of clinical care is provided by either NHS foundation trusts, which are run business style or can now be contracted out to private companies.
GPs are now strapped into CCGs which must contract out local health services to the lowest bidder on competitive tendering, which includes ‘any qualified provider’.
At the centre of the Act is the ‘failure regime’ and ‘foundation trust pipeline’, which is being used to accelerate the closure of 60 District General Hospitals.
BMA council chair Mark Porter said: ‘We continue to be deeply concerned about the impact of the reforms on the NHS, particularly the way competition will operate.’
Unison head of health Christina McAnea said: ‘We continue to fear the worst, which is the fragmentation of the service and, effectively, the end of the NHS as we know it.
‘The recent Francis report pointed to the dangerous and destabilising effect of financially driven organisational change.’
Nick Black, professor of health service research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warned: ‘What we have got at the moment is a perfect storm with three major things happening – the changes in the structure, the fall-out from Francis and the Nicholson challenge (where the NHS has been tasked with making £20 billion in efficiency savings during the four years to 2015).’
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said the NHS is on a ‘fast-track to fragmentation and privatisation’.