In recent weeks scarcely a day has gone by without new and very disturbing information about the crisis in the National Health Service. Ever longer waiting times in A&E departments, postponement of non-emergency operations, skilled surgeons having to waste their precious time waiting for beds to become available, hospital doctors buckling under stress, and so on - it seems that the tremendous improvements that we saw in the first decade of this century have all been overturned.
All around the country people are coming together to form local NHS defence groups. Here in Enfield a group calling itself Defend Enfield NHS (DeNHS) was set up last year. This weekend it will be holding its first public meeting (10am on Saturday 18th February at the New Crown in Southgate).
Ahead of the meeting DeNHS has issued a document setting out its concerns and the steps it is taking to defend the NHS in Enfield.
Far from being a ‘money pit’, NHS funding is now reduced to 8.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) compared with France’s 10.9% and Germany’s 11% GDP health spends. They face the same challenges as the UK - ageing populations, obesity, smoking and long term conditions like diabetes.
Every year more services are contracted out, with 40% of contracts going to the private sector in 2015. £250 billion has been spent on using the private sector to build new hospitals, often locking the NHS into long-term loan repayments at high rates of interest, instead of spending the money on patient care. Far from boosting efficiency, the requirement for NHS commissioners to buy in services on a competitive basis adds in an extra layer of bureaucracy and is very expensive for both purchaser and provider. It is estimated that every year £4.5 billion is wasted in this way - enough to pay for either ten specialist hospitals; 174,798 extra nurses; 42,413 extra GPs. Meanwhile there are 25,000 nursing vacancies and the pay freeze has seen the value of NHS salaries reduce by 14%.
Local people still remember how Highlands Hospital was closed in 1993 and the closure of the accident and emergency department at Chase Farm Hospital in 2013 without providing suitably enhanced services to compensate.
We have joined 
