1  

SUSSEX HEALTH BULLETIN

Sussex Defend our NHS

WORKERS, CAMPAIGNERS, COMMUNITIES TOGETHER      

Contact defendournhs@gmail.com Website http://defendthenhssussex.weebly.com/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SussexDefendTheNHS https://twitter.com/SussexDefendNHS

Keep our NHS public ken.kirk1@ntlworld.com Sat 9 Aug Sussex Defend the

NHS/KONP Stall 11-1 Bottom St James Street, in front war memorial

Tues 12 Aug

Sussex Defend the NHS Organising meeting

7pm Brighthelm Centre

Sun 17 Aug

Sussex Defend NHS/KONP Stall

Brunswick Festival, Brunswick Sq Hove, 12-6pm

Thurs 21 Aug

Public meeting Save Eastbourne healthworkers’ jobs

Eastbourne Unite conference centre – evening (details to follow)

Sat 6 Sept 999 Call for the NHS –People's #march4nhs

Westminster London- Rally for end of march from Jarrow

Tues 9 Sept

Health and Well Being Board

4pm Hove Town Hall (lobby against contracting out of Drug and Alcohol teams/SMS)

Tues 9 Sept

Sussex Defend the NHS organising meeting

7pm Brighthelm Centre

Wed 10 Sept

Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee

4pm Hove Town Hall

Lots more happening Sept and October – dates to follow soon! THE LONG ARM OF THE CSU… Janet Sang Sussex Defend our NHS Commissioning Support Units were set up in 2011 to provide independent legal and professional back up to the newly formed Clinical Commissioning Groups. The CCGs, on the other hand, responsible for two thirds of the entire NHS budget, would be doing the business of assessing the needs of their communities and commissioning health services.

But although CSUs were presented to the public as the back-room office of CCGs, they’ve served another purpose. Former NHS finance and management personnel

  2  

moved onto the CSU boards with figures from private health, consultancy and pharmaceutical companies. CSUs have provided the means for the private sector to develop their influence over the procurement processes adopted by CCGs.

How are CSUs shaping up?

So far NHS England has subsidised CSUs and continues to employ their 9000 strong staff (now through NHS Business Authority). CSUs are due to become entirely self-funding by 2016. In the run up, there have been mergers and redundancies. Of the twenty-three original CSUs only sixteen remain, with the most local to Brighton being CSU South, in Hampshire.

Will CSUs survive?

That’s not clear. In one example of direct competition to local CSUs, Southampton and seventeen other CCGs have pooled budgets for commissioning advice and awarded a £3.3million contract to Optum, part of the giant United HealthCare. And now NHS England has advertised £5bn worth of such work to “preferred” providers, who’ll be allowed to offer CCGs and hospitals a streamlined procurement procedure, freed of some of the safeguards that are a legacy of the public sector. CSUs could notionally become mutuals but are more likely to be taken over by the biggest and most ruthless players in the health market.

Why does this matter?

It’s another step in the escalating control of our Health Service by private equity firms and multi-nationals such as Optum, Serco, Assura and KPMG. They will dominate the market NHS England has created for them in commissioning advice, secure the custom of CCGs through price-cutting, and limit the CCGs’ options.

But don’t forget commissioning advice is only part of their business; they also run front-line health services, supply goods, pharmaceuticals and health insurance. The same companies that bid for NHS contracts will be advising CCGs on the bidding process itself. So they are strengthening their own control not only of how contracts are awarded but on who are the winners. And as we know, there are rich pickings to be had. CHANNEL 4 AND RUFUS HOUND INTERVIEW AND MEDIA MANIPULATION Great, we thought, at last a discussion about the extent of privatisation of the NHS on a television news programme. However in the course of the very biased interview conducted by Cathy Newman of Channel 4 news, the figure of 6% takeover of the NHS budget by private companies was repeated several times.

This is clearly the figure being put out by the Department of Health.

Even 6% of the in excess of £100 billion NHS budget would be a disgrace (a point unfortunately not picked up on). But we know the percentage is far higher and privatisation far more advanced than this suggests. The 6% was unfortunately left unchallenged during the exchange.

NHS Support Federation research In a rare example of facts about what is actually happening to the NHS getting through to the mainstream media there was a report on BBC news and in some newspapers in January (a report in favour of the NHS which actually managed to get through).

The NHS Support Federation says that NHS contracts worth a total of £5bn were advertised between April-December 2013. Of those, contracts worth £510m were actually awarded in that time with £450m worth awarded to non-NHS suppliers (70%). These figures were taken from an analysis of the European procurement website http://ted.europa.eu/TED/misc/chooseLanguage.do

  3  

Current estimates of privatised services vary from £11 – 16 billion. Leaked government documents suggest £20 billion in privatised services by the time of the 2015 elections.

The more success campaigning groups have in getting over our message, the more the media are going to engage in mis-information, if not downright lies, to undermine our case. In whatever context we are discussing the NHS whether with friends, colleagues, in press releases or interviews on local radio or television, we all need facts at our fingertips.

I KEEP THINKING ABOUT NORMAN Aidan Pettit – Sussex Defend our NHS In this article Aidan shows how complex and inter-connected the growing private sector stranglehold on our public services is with ever bigger firms commanding ever bigger slices of the privatisation pie.

Lord Norman Blackwell isn’t an MP, a Minister or a civil servant. He was a policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher and he’s a Board member of a right wing think tank - the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – set up by Margaret Thatcher, which boasts of its role in ‘the dissemination of free market economics ... [and] developing the policies of privatisation [and] low-tax government’.

In a CPS pamphlet, Blackwell wrote: ’The steps taken by the Coalition to reform public services ... have not yet gone far enough. ... Provision of public services should be seen as a competitive market served by private, entrepreneurial suppliers ... (Similarly) the original plans for NHS reform (which allowed a greater role for private organisations to provide NHS services). However, the subsequent restatement – while maintaining many of the core principles – risks slowing the pace and impact of these changes’.1

Last year, former (recently demoted) Secretary of Education Michael Gove gave the CPS Keith Joseph memorial lecture and was fulsome in his praise for Blackwell.

Gove knows Blackwell because Blackwell is Chairman of Interserve – just one of the private companies granted government contracts worth billions to take over our education and health services (amongst others). One such contract for the company to take over hospital services in Cumbria brought redundancies, forced unpaid overtime and pay and pension cuts to all the hospital workers unfortunate enough to be involved.

At a time when Interserve’s profits were rocketing to £182.9m and revenues increasing by 6% to nearly £2bn, staff at the British Medical Association were being paid poverty wages of £6.19 per hour under a cleaning contract taken over by the company.

The list of Interserve’s and their illustrious chairman’s other involvements is lengthy and include:

- Huge contracts to build academies in Leeds and Portsmouth. - Via co-ownership of Rehab Jobfit - a £130M contract to deliver the Work

Programme. One year after this contract was awarded the Guardian reported that Rehab Jobfit was one of the very worst performers in the country.2

- Taking advantage of the privatisation of prisons and probation - University of Sussex’s proposed handing over to Interserve of campus facilities

contract was the reason for the mass student-led anti-privatisation campaign and demos at the University last year.

                                                                                                                         

1 http://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/111027143205-20110707EconomyLookBackFromTheFuture.pdf 2 http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/27/data-work-programme-failures

  4  

- Last year Blackwell (once a director of failed bank Nat West) was appointed chairman of Lloyds Bank – a bank a third owned by the public.

So who holds rich and powerful businessmen like Blackwell to account? Who prevents Interserve from making profits from privatisation and exploiting cleaners, hospital, college, school and university workers and the unemployed. Who prevents them being paid enormous amounts of money for sub-standard services?

Will a general election give us the opportunity to remove Blackwell and Interserve from universities, schools and hospitals?

Or should staff and students at universities and in schools and academies, hospital workers and facilities staff, workers made redundant by Interserve and the unemployed failed by the Work Programme unite to challenge and defend themselves against Interserve and their like?

THE NHS IS LOVED AND EFFICIENT SO WHY THE OBSESSION WITH REFORM? Extract from a much longer article by Will Hutton in the Observer – Saturday 21st June 2014

Last week, Reform, David Cameron's favourite thinktank, published Going with Change by Paul Corrigan and Mike Parish, a classic of the genre. The NHS, they claim, is in a twin crisis of affordability and uneven treatment. It needs to open itself up to dynamic corporate entrants who will lead necessary structural re-ordering, as has happened in high street retailing. Unfortunately, the NHS "is particularly hostile to competition". Professionals, unionised workers and meddlesome politicians need to stand aside and allow the system to become rational, transaction-oriented and incentivised. Only thus will it survive.

Corrigan and Parish write in ignorance of international trends, developments in economics and, above all, the centrality of values. Rather than suffering from a twin crisis that needs their silly nostrums, the NHS is the cheapest system in the world producing the best health outcomes. The New York-based Commonwealth Fund ranks 11 advanced countries' health systems for cost and health outcomes. Britain spends $3,404 (£2,000) per head on health compared with the $8,508 (£5,001) by the open-to-new-entrants US system, with the other nine countries in between.

Yet on effectiveness, safety, patient centredness, co-ordination, quality and access, Britain scores number one. It an uncomfortable truth that trumps Corrigan and Parish's argument. The NHS may have problems, but it is not in crisis. It faces an ageing population and more expensive treatments, but from the best starting point.

If there is a financial squeeze looming, it won't be because of the NHS's excellent performance. Rather, it is because the government has decided, for no reason but ideological zeal, that Britain should shrink general public spending to the same proportions of GDP as we had in 1948.

However, as the country grows richer, we will want to spend more proportionally on our superbly cost-effective and efficient healthcare system, but that is prohibited because, as a tax-funded system, that would imply higher taxation, which obstructs "wealth generation".

Already, the NHS is fragmented into more than 500 statutory organisations. It does need more big hospital "hubs" and fewer smaller hospitals, but that should not be the excuse for more brainless wrecking of what remains a phenomenal organisation – cheap, generally high quality and value-driven, as you find when you are inside it.

We can own and we can pay for a great health system. It just takes the collective will.

  5  

THE ROLL OF DISHONOUR

(thanks  for  the  original  idea  to  the  Bexley,  Bromley  and  Greenwich  branch  of  the  National  Health  Action  Party)    

 Those of you who witnessed ritual unfurlings of the Roll of Dishonour during our recent exhibition and public meeting will be fully aware of the impact over 8 metres of names of peers and MPs with vested interests in private healthcare companies can make. Here is a breakdown of the names on the list.    

Peers  -­‐  65  Tory,  37  Labour,    12  Liberal,    33  Crossbench,  I  Bishop.        Total  148      MPs  63  Tory,  12  Labour,  4  Liberals  plus  MPs  who  are  heavily  involved  in  the  privatised  healthcare  sector  since  leaving  office  such  as  Alan  Milburn  and  Patricia  Hewitt.  Total  79    (plus  ex-­‐MPs)    

What Price Democracy? The House of Lords voted by 328 votes to 213 a majority of 115 to dismiss the motion against delaying the passage of the bill until the government released the transitional Risk Register (which a Freedom of Information Tribunal had ordered the govt to release TWICE). This was just before the final votes passing the bill.

There was a majority of 82 in the House of Commons on the same motion. All but 2 Lib Dem MPs voted with the government.

We are producing our own version of the roll on material so it can be used in future campaigning actions. We have made a start at our latest stall. Passers-by were queuing for the opportunity to write MPs’ and peers’ names on our roll. We are also going to organise public recitations of the names in conjunction with our stalls.

If you would like to get involved in writing on or using the Roll in actions, keep an eye out for future dates.

Anyone who can’t wait to see all the disgraceful detail of the roll with full listings of individual involvements can go to the original document - http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/compilation-of-parliamentary-financial.html Substance Misuse Service UPDATE Drug and alcohol team members have been joined by Defend the NHS supporters in collecting over 1200 signatures for their petition to stop their service being put out to tender by Brighton and Hove City Council. They’ll be lobbying councillors and presenting their petition outside and at the Health and Wellbeing Board on Tues September 9th, 3.30pm, Hove Town Hall.

  6  

EASTBOURNE DGH There have been two lunchtime demos and a very well-attended march on Saturday 26th July through Eastbourne town centre, about the latest unfair and unreasonable redeployments of over potentially 200 staff from around the East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust to other areas within the county. This is the latest in a series of attacks on the hospital since Chief Executive Darren Grayson came into post.

Gary Palmer, GMB Organiser says: GMB members, NHS staff, local politicians and public pressure groups, such as Save the DGH, are protesting against and challenging poor decisions of Chief Executive Darren Grayson and defending services at the Eastbourne Hospital against his plans. Uckfield, Lewes, Bexhill, Rye hospitals in the county are also under threat. Even the Conquest Hospital in Hastings is facing the threat of outsourcing in soft fm areas, with the Trust saying it is not ruling out doing the same potentially with clinical services.

Grayon clearly doesn’t do Consultation, Communication and Consideration.

The GMB are about protecting NHS Hospitals, the services they provide and importantly the staff who work within it and we will continue to battle against all austerity within the NHS. The money is there to maintain services; Grayson needs to stop wasting large sums of public money on employing so called overpaid experts to do his own job. All he needs to do is to speak to the people who can make meaningful suggestions on efficiency savings and changes which would benefit patients and services alike – hospital and other NHS staff. The same people he is forcing to see their own standards of living continuously fall.

This fight is for everyone in East Sussex. An attack on one hospital in the county is an attack on us all.

So support your local hospitals, the services they provide and the hardworking NHS staff in them. Let’s send a clear message to the Chief Exec – Eastbourne DGH is our hospital and we demand you respect the staff within it, and the only useful cut at the Trust you can make is to Resign! Put the evening of Saturday 21st August – the date of the next demo in your diaries. Location and details to be confirmed. BSUH PUSHING PRIVATE HEALTHCARE An important email from a local GP.

“Recently several patients of mine have received letters from the local hospital trust, while waiting for treatment. The letter is acknowledgement of the referral and an offer of access to private services provided by BSUH (Brighton and Sussex University Hospital) if they 'have private insurance or would like to know more about private services'.

We were all surprised by this to say the least.

I really wanted to share this experience with you - is this happening on a large scale? Seems like a good way to undermine the NHS further and market private services to worried or vulnerable patients who have already been referred to receive care within the NHS. I'd be interested in your response.”

We will be featuring latest developments with GP practices in the next newsletter. In the meantime see a very powerful article about the serious threat to GP services on our website http://defendthenhssussex.weebly.com/

  7  

Across the country and the county GP practices serving less affluent areas are facing closure because of the latest government cuts. We have to act before our surgeries start to disappear. If you have any ideas for articles or campaigns you think should be happening contact us on defendournhs@gmail.com