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Doomed NHS faces tough year
• YET again the New Labour spinners have revealed their mastery of burying bad news at the very moment when the thoughts of the public lie elsewhere.
On this occasion, while festive spirits ran high, the Department of Health (DoH) announced that a private health company would take over a hospital in Hampshire – the first time this has happened since the NHS was founded nearly 60 years ago.
The DoH believe it is a step towards greater efficiency.
The union, Unison, inevitably, differ. They believe it is a “seismic shift” in pushing the NHS into the hands of the private sector.
The hospital in question is the Lymington New Forest Hospital.
But, wait a few years, and not all that many if the opponents of the NHS have their way, and it could happen to a London hospital, perhaps even here in Camden.
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt may puff and pant, but all the signs are that the break-up of the NHS is on the horizon.
Eminent doctors we have spoken to in recent months have, in private, made such Cassandra noises.
They see the NHS being stripped down to emergency services only while other departments slowly but surely fall into private hands.
All in the name of progress, of course.
At the moment, while hospital trusts struggle to lift themselves out of financial black-holes – in the borough hospitals are tens of millions in the red – the first victims are medical staff.
This has been feeding through into a reduction of medical posts, including those of consultants, as well as nursing posts.
For the first time, according to the medical press, hundreds of junior doctors, competing for the fewer consultant posts available, are likely to find themselves out of a job.
The truth is that Britain has never trained enough doctors, in contrast with France, Italy, Germany and even Cuba!
New Labour should have started to put it right when it came to power in 1997 but restricted by Gordon Brown’s policy, it did not do so until three years ago, by which time it was too little, too late.
We predict that in the next few years the NHS, ill-provisioned with doctors, and top heavy with managers, will continue to attract the sharp tongue of the tabloids, the one ‘focus group’ both New Labour, Tories and the Lib-Dems are afraid of.
Portrayed as beyond salvation, who will then be brought in as a saviour? Private medicine!
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