Alex Sampson, Plymouth Socialist Party
The Labour government’s latest plans to reduce NHS waiting lists and the huge pressures on hospital consultants are encouraging GPs not to send patients to hospital. GPs will receive £20 every time a patient is successfully referred to a community hub rather than to a hospital specialist. Examples used include referrals for ear, nose and throat issues, irritable bowel syndrome, and menopause treatments.
A focus on cutting waiting lists may feel like welcome news to the millions of patients who are in the huge backlog caused by over a decade of cuts. But will this be a real solution to the issues that face our crumbling NHS?
A large part of this plan rests on the creation of more Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs), which are built outside of hospitals, often in easy-to-reach town centre locations. Some CDCs are open 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Labour’s stated aim to improve waiting times and healthcare comes up against its self-imposed strict spending rules. In Plymouth alone, the University Hospital Trust has just announced £67 million in cuts which could mean up to 600 job losses at Derriford Hospital, already struggling to cope with heavy workloads and lack of staff.
More choice and flexibility is positive for people desperate to be seen by a health professional. But this plan is being implemented with the increased involvement of private healthcare companies, who are already straining at the bit to increase the profits they make from our ill health. GPs directing more work to services provided by private healthcare firms will be a real detriment to already underfunded NHS services. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made no secret of his desire to use more private healthcare companies rather than rebuild a fully nationalised NHS.
As the salami slicing of our precious and hard-fought-for health service continues, working-class people will continue to lose access to very necessary health services. Huge numbers of people have already lost dental services and some of the ear, nose and throat services referred to – such as ear wax removal – are almost entirely only available for a charge now. This might seem reasonable to an MP on over £90,000 a year, but a charge of £50 to a minimum-wage worker could be the difference between being able to eat or get to work for a week.
Our NHS is under threat from Labour just as much as it was from the previous Conservative governments. Good health should not be the preserve of the wealthy or the lucky. Everyone should have access to high quality health care, no matter where they live or what they earn. To protect our precious NHS, we need to fight for it. We need to build a new mass workers’ party with a socialist programme, which would reverse all the cuts of the last 15 years of austerity and reinstitute a fully funded health service, free from the private-healthcare vultures, with a democratically nationalised pharmaceutical industry and free for all to use.
