Events

NHS: ‘Liberation’ or Evisceration? What are the ConDems doing to our healthcare?

Wednesday 22nd September 2010
6:00pm to 8:00pm

Speakers: Dr John Lister, (part time) Director of London Health Emergency, and (part time) Senior Lecturer in Health Journalism at Coventry University.

Venue: Quaker (Friends) Meeting House, 22 School Lane, next to The Bluecoat, Liverpool L1 3BT

“The Con-Dem coalition could bring the end of the NHS as we know it - by 2015, if Health Secretary Andrew Lansley succeeds in pushing through the proposals in his White Paper misleadingly entitled “Liberating the NHS”. It would reduce the NHS from a public service delivering health care to a fund that commissions care from a range of private providers.

Thousands of staff face redundancy with the scrapping of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities: thousands more in front-line health care will also lose their jobs, as £20 billion of “efficiency savings” are pushed through by 2014. Local planning mechanisms will be scrapped, and £80 billion of commissioning budgets entrusted to 500 consortia of GPs, opening up the prospect of a new postcode lottery” for patients and the widening of inequalities. The £20 billion cuts will reduce these consortia to rationing boards.
This major threat to our NHS has been poorly and superficially reported in the press: John Lister argues it’s urgent to sound the alarm.”