Frank Dobson in Cornwall to Save Our NHS

Labour members meeting Frank Dobson at All Saints Community Centre, Camborne.

Frank Dobson was the Health Secretary who stopped the local health authority from closing community hospitals in Cornwall back in 1997.  As he told us, it was the wrong decision based on cost cutting not healthcare needs.  Frank is a passionate advocate for the NHS and had a brilliant way of describing it as the service that does not just bind our wounds, but binds us together as a community.  He is so right. Most of us love the idea that OUR NHS treats us, our friends, neighbours and everyone on the basis of our medical needs not our ability to pay.

Many of us also suspect that this socialist outlook is anathema to Conservative philosophy, which is the reason for Andrew Lansley’s hasty, ill conceived and destructive bill to change our NHS so fundamentally that I wonder if it could still be called our national health service.

In Cornwall, the Primary Care Trust is preparing to convert the community health services into a ‘Community Interest Company’ (CIC) to deliver health care.

It isn’t the CIC that is the big issue, but that it will be outside the NHS and in the future the service will have to go out to tender. The phrase is ‘Any Willing Provider’ will be able to bid to deliver any service.  So, the new structure will protect our services and its constitution will mean it can only act in the community interest. Until the service goes to tender.  Not only will any private company be able to bid but because of EU competition laws, the big American healthcare providers would be able to take the NHS or GPs to court if they don’t get awarded the contracts or feel the tenders were put together in such a way as to disadvantage them.

So, who has the power? Patients, GPs, or rapacious, profit making companies answerable firstly to shareholders?

When meeting with the PCT recently, I also asked about assets.  If the Community Interest Company runs for three years and builds up assets or surpluses, they have to be used for us all and our benefit.  For example, if the CIC bought a new ultrasound machine, it would have to be used for us.  But if that were privately owned, it could be used for private treatment, shipped off or sold even though funded by taxpayers through the contract.

This is coming – this is what the Tories are pushing through even though it wasn’t in their manifesto and this is what many Lib Dems are voting for (some have already said they won’t but not enough to stop it) even though it is not even in the coalition agreement.

Frank Dobson saved our community hospitals in 1997 and he came to Cornwall last Friday to help us raise awareness of plans to destroy our NHS and hand in our local petition to debate this at the council on 29 March.

Please help us get the word out across the country and let your local MP know that they will never be forgiven if they vote for this – find out more and sign the independent, cross party, 38 degrees petition at the link below.

Save Our NHS