Health Service in Clear and Present Danger

Private hospitals will plunder our national health service of resources, human and financial, while our waiting lists grow day on day.

Two large NHS hospitals near the proposed private providers are surrounded by large working-class areas, with some of the worst poverty, multiple deprivations and health inequalities in western Europe. Some people who live there have a life expectancy of ten years less than those in the middle- and upper-class areas. Relative and abject poverty has increased, and child poverty has risen. 25% of our children across Northern Ireland now live in poverty. Those children will grow into adulthood with health needs because where there is poverty there is also deprivation and health inequalities.

The private sector are not interested in dealing with health inequalities, they are only interested in the bottom line on the spreadsheet. They cherry-pick the type of cases they want to take. Quick and profitable it's theirs, complex and serious its ours, they would deem it to costly and would minimise profits to their directors and shareholders.

The plans that their flagship King’s Hall medical facilities have for using disused shopping centre across Northern Ireland shows how confident they have become that they are the health provider preferred by the power brokers inside and outside of our healthcare and political systems.

Having money should not mean you can jump the queue. Everyone is entitled to highest level of quality healthcare free to all our citizens.

It is extremely disconcerting that the language used to described what they aspire to deliver on health care across Northern Ireland, including mental health therapy, exactly mirrors that used in the Health Minister’s Three-Year Health Strategy. It is also the language of the Better Hospitals-Better Outcomes document currently out for consultation.

The Transforming Your Care reforms which were rushed through in six weeks with no Equality Impact Assessment privatised our home care services and residential homes.

Transforming Your Care also had plans to close a number of hospitals and other healthcare facilities, before widespread opposition stopped it in its tracks.

"By then the damage was already done to homecare and residential care. These services had gone to the private sector. This dreadful decision has significantly added to the current crisis we have in our health services at the present time with patients unable to be discharged from hospitals, because of the lack of homecare packages and residential care beds. One would think lessons would have been learned.

But sadly not. The Bengoa report which has political buy in, is also heavily reliant on the ‘third sector’, meaning the fragmentation and privatisation of our National Health Service. When will our politicians and Health Service leaders realise that the private sector cannot solve the problem in our healthcare systems?

The private sector has no interest in solving a problem they have fostered and helped create in the pursuit of profits. Nor can we tolerate the constant ‘reform’ of the structures, with each ‘reform’ wasting billions of pounds and leading to clinical outcomes that are worse in both quality and quantity.

Reforms won't work if we don't deal with the culture that has been allowed to grow, where vested interests and career aspirations have become more important that the needs of patients.

We the taxpayers pay for our National Health Service through our national insurance and income taxes. We own it, we want to maintain it, we want to ensure there will be no two-tier system. Our citizens deserve quality healthcare.