What’s Happening to the NHS?

The sell-off of the NHS started in the Thatcher era with things like cleaning, catering and portering services. Now the Labour Government is going much further, by ‘outsourcing’ many clinical services and hospital building projects to private companies. The NHS is becoming a ‘service buyer’ rather than a ‘service provider’.

Privatisation pushes costs up …

Private companies spend more on their shareholders, fat-cat directors, and on marketing to win more ‘customers’. The extra costs will come from your taxes. NHS patients will also have to pay top-up fees for some services which used to be free (e.g. 1-to-1 midwife care).

… and pulls standards down

With less money to spend on providing services to patients, standards are bound to slip – just as many hospitals got dirtier when cleaning was contracted out. Services that are already under-resourced (such as mental health and care for the elderly) will be neglected even more.

Private = Unaccountable

Experience has shown that many private health firms refuse to answer even the most basic questions about their service standards, claiming that this information is ‘commercially confidential’! What’s the point of having more ‘choice’ if we can’t make an informed choice? And who wants to travel far for healthcare anyway? What people really want is good local services.

The Green Party believes that health services should be:

• Publicly-owned and run for the benefit of patients not shareholders – we would stop the transfer of NHS provision to private companies.
• Free at the point of use. We would abolish existing charges for things like prescriptions, eye tests and dental treatment, and introduce an NHS tax to make funding fairer and more transparent.
• Focused much more on preventing ill-health – our policies address the causes of many diseases – such as environmental pollution and unhealthy lifestyles.
• Delivered through community health centres instead of centralised services wherever possible.

The national Keep Our NHS Public campaign

For more information about all our policies see: www.greenparty.org.uk