NHS cash Crisis

Written by Dr Evan Harris MP on Thu 17th Nov 2005

Not education, education, education but health, health, health or rather cuts, cuts, cuts is the political legacy of the Tony Blair's Government in Oxfordshire.

It is remarkable that after 8 years of a Labour Government the main thing that patients, doctors and nurses are all talking about now is the prospect of appalling cuts to front-line services due to a cash crisis. What we know about so far - and this makes up only a fraction of the £30million that have to be found - are the closure of the acute psychiatric in-patient service at the JR, the closure of the in-patient pain service beds at the Churchill, cuts to the Horton in Banbury, the closure of an orthopaedic ward at the NOC, and cuts in the services for disabled children.

What is the health Secretary Patricia Hewitt doing about it? Nothing. In fact she is insisting that there are deeper cuts still because she wants to achieve break-even this year, not over time. There are other ways to break even without damaging patient services. The Government could provide more cash as a loan to the County - like it did just before the General Election or - just as good - stop setting political "must do" targets which force the local health authorities to break the bank to meet them, to avoid being "named and shamed".

All that Patricia has come up with for poor Oxfordshire patients and staff is the privatisation of the primary care trust management. That is market ideology, Thatcherism gone mad. For a start it means the redundancy (and redundancy payments) for the existing managers, and it means private companies with shareholder returns (not patient outcomes) as the main driver being responsible for hundreds of millions of pounds of NHS cash.

Nice one Pat!