IT WAS ‘black Wednesday’ for the health service in Wales on 24 November.
The New Labour-dominated Welsh Assembly government announced the effective
closure of the paediatric neurosurgery unit at Swansea’s Morriston hospital.
Rob Williams, Swansea Socialist Party
Despite huge anger by local people, including 17,000 signing a petition
organised by a local paper, the children who need to use the brain surgery
unit will have to transfer to Cardiff, where the service will be centralised.
The Wales BMA recently lashed out at the Assembly for presiding over the
longest hospital waiting lists in Britain – over 300,000, one in 12 Welsh
people are now on a waiting list. In Swansea, the figure is actually closer to
one in five!
Health Minster Jane Hutt survived a ‘no-confidence’ motion in the Assembly
this week but for working-class people, nothing is safe in the hands of New
Labour.
The neurosurgery ‘downgrade’ is the latest in a whole raft of similar cuts
over the last few years. Casualty units in Llanelli and Neath/ Port Talbot
hospitals have been downgraded so the area’s main A&E in Morriston now has an
average waiting time of six hours. Earlier this year, some pensioners had to
wait on trolleys for four days before a proper bed could be found!
Socialist Party members in Swansea have been fighting attempts to further
downgrade the casualty unit at the city’s other hospital, Singleton.
Maternity unit
We also played a leading role in the campaign to stop the Neath/Port Talbot
hospital having its maternity unit downgraded. Unfortunately, the number of
births there will be almost halved by the cuts and mothers and babies could be
put at risk by the new mantra of centralisation.
In New Labour’s NHS, you can’t expect your local hospital to have full
services. However, for specialised services in particular, you might have to
go to the other end of Wales or even into England.
Morriston’s burns unit, which saved the lives of Port Talbot steelworkers
after the 2001 blast furnace accident, is ‘competing’ with Bristol. Such
relentless rationalisation from a government which has no qualms about
spending £4 million a day in Iraq!
Some in New Labour hold up NHS ‘successes’ in England as proof that Welsh
Labour has to follow a faster road to privatisation to find a cure to this
disaster.
However, the reality for working-class people in England is the same
queues, cuts and crises. Health provision should be on the basis of need not
profit.
Through reversing the PFIs, PPs, foundation hospitals etc, alongside
nationalising the huge pharmaceutical companies, the NHS could begin to be
transformed from the milch-cow of the private sectors into a well-researched
essential service.
