35 people attended the meeting on NHS Privatisation held at Transport House on November 3rd.
John Lister from London Health Emergency opened the meeting by describing the huge impact which private finance and financial accounting practices were having on the NHS.
The new QE would cost £2000m over 40 years for a £531m hospital. In many cases where the maintenance cost is included, PFI schemes cost 6 to 8 times the construction cost, crippling NHS Trusts for years to come.
The new Private Treatment Centres are guaranteed a steady supply of routine operations leaving NHS Trusts with the more complex cases, and an uneven workload, but the Trusts still have to show a financial surplus.
The NHS Lift programme will see GP practices lease back surgeries built by private finance, encouraging takeovers by private healtcare trusts. GP’s independence will be compromised because patients are now atached to a practice and not an individual doctor. If they are sacked by a healthcare firm they would lose their patients too.
Sue Irwin from Torbay Unison described the successful struggle to prevent the concentration of sterilisation services in Barnstaple, Taunton, and Torbay into a private ‘supercentre’ at Taunton. This would have required staff members and sterile equipment to travel 50 miles up and down the M5 and A38 to the detriment of cleaning activities in Torbay Hospitals.
Staff expressed their opposition to these crazy proposals by picketing the Torbay NHS Trust meeting. This caused the Chief Executive to reflect on whether the supercentre was really in the interests of patients, and to agree to discuss alternative arrangement with the decontamination staff. Following these discussions the Torbay Trust withdrew from the supercentre and decided to keep its decontamination services in-house.
This led to similar decisions by Bounemouth and Poole trusts skuppering plans for a second private supercentre in Poole. All decontamination services in the South West will now remain in-house and within the NHS.
Caroline, a UNISON rep from Manchester Health spoke about the case of Karen Reissmann who had been unable to attend because of other commitments.
Karen was sacked for publicly opposing the semi-privatisation of mental health services in South Manchester by the almost universal use of agency workers. She was supported by many of her colleagues who went on strike for 44 days demanding her reinstatement.
Karen turned down the insulting offer of a pay-off from the Health Trust and is pursuing her demand for full reinstatement but unfortunately without the financial support of UNISON whose legal department recommended acceptance of the pay-off.
Karen has been elected to the UNISON executive, underlining the broad support she has in her campaign.
Dave Mathieson, the executive member for public services from the T&G Section of UNITE spoke of the difficulties workers found in overcoming the resistance of union officials to action over cuts in services and wage cuts.
The loyalty of union leaders to the Labour leadership is very strong and their main concern seems to be to defuse workers anger by futile negotiations and token actions.
The division of industries between unions also provided a smokescreen for union leaders to blame each other and not their own policies for their failures.
Building local unity between different unions and different areas of public services was essential to overcome the generalised attacks from the government and local authorities on wages and conditions, and to fight the constant stream of privatisations.
A lively discussion followed the speakers.
