Campaign resources
These materials are provided for campaigners on the NHS and health issues. We own the copyright of the cartoons and we are happy to give you permission to use our material so long as you notify us and acknowledge the source. There are of course plenty of other organisations producing material you can use. Please let us know if you know of other useful stuff.
- Ready made leaflet - we can customise it for you
- Petition to the Lords
- Campaign Tee shirts
- Cartoons - free for you to use
- Lansley - Tory Boys' picnic - a good song for a demonstration
- You and your GP
Sites which are useful for organising or publicising events, and several also have an online petition, apart from lots of briefing material:
- Campaigning in the Lords
- False Economy
- 38 Degrees
- Keep Our NHS Public
- Unite 4 our NHS
- Unison
- Protecting Frontline NHS Services
- NHSOS: Protecting London's NHS Services
- NHS Future
What do doctors think about NHS Reform?
If you want to talk to your local Liberal Democrats there is a useful directory by constituency.
The battleground, marginal constituencies where the next general Election will be decided.
credit Kuhn / Bird
Public Opinion
Can satisfaction with the NHS get any higher? December 2011
A GFK/NOP poll has found that the public oppose the government’s plan for GPs to take control of £80bn of the NHS budget. The survey of a 1000 people, carried out for the NHS Support Federation found that two thirds (65%) did not want GPs to extend their duties beyond medical matters and take on the buying of care from local hospitals.
The poll was carried out by GFK/NOP and organised by Prof Colin Francome on behalf of the Federation between 4TH - 6TH MARCH 2011, it asked 1000 adults aged 16+ the following:
The government is proposing that doctors should not concentrate solely on medical matters, but should also take on a role in organising payments for hospital care. Do you agree or disagree with this change? In response 27% agreed, 65% disagreed, 7% answered don’t know.
NHS staff survey finds big concerns over NHS reform June 2011
Who supports these NHS reforms?
Policy issues
The New NHS- Reflections on the duties of government and the privatisation of services
- Still Fatally Flawed
- A Stabilisation Plan for the NHS
- With a likely cost of £4 billion, the Health and Social Care Bill has all the hallmarks of an avoidable policy fiasco.
- The role of the private sector in the NHS - Andy Burnham
- Gambling with your health
- Denigration of the NHS
- The Cost of NHS reorganisation and the rise in Waiting Lists
- The Commonwealth Fund 2011 International Health Policy Survey of Sicker Adults in Eleven Countries
- The cost of chronic disease/ and the lack of NHS reform
- Guardian roundup of opposition Sept 2011
- Exposing the continuing flaws in the NHS reorganisation
- Unite health briefing papers
- The Miner’s Canary, let it fly Inaugural Professorial Lecture given by Tony Beddow
- ‘Defend our NHS’ Meeting calls on MP to fight for changes to NHS Reforms
- A historical perspective on competition in health
- The Dark Side - The end of our NHS
- The Lewisham NHS petition - designed to deliver to your local MP
- Ten questions for the Coalition government
- Dr Tomlinson's blog has a lot of excellent facts and references demolishing Lansley's proposition that the NHS is a basket case.
- The Health and Social Care Bill 2011 Why it should be fought Dr Paul Hobday
- Cameron's Myths about the NHS
- Health and Social Care Bill - rebutting the rebuttals
- Briefing on Lansley's Reforms
Stunts
NHS for Sale - script for a bit of street theatre
Don't Stich Me Up - words and music
The Liverpool Socialist Singers are available to liven up events! They don't insist on singing in a cathedral - they will do railway stations, hospitals and public places.
Videos
Dr Jonathan Tomlinson has collected a load of useful campaigning videos and there more on our Youtube channel
The Andrew Lansley rap. Its a bit rude
Support the NHS
The government is imposing huge changes on the NHS. These plans – set out in the Health and Social Care Bill currently going through Parliament – will change our National Health Service beyond recognition.
The speed and scale of these changes is massive. Patients and staff will be the losers.
- The need for radical change is predicated upon NHS failure – but evidence of success is being supressed. Satisfaction surveys which have provided a continuous performance check for decades have been irresponsibly abandoned: the 2008 survey showed a record 67% satisfaction (compared with a record low point of 37% in 1997), correlated with waiting times coming down from 18 months to 18 weeks over the same period. Tough targets have benefited patients, and while they have caused some clinicians to complain, they have also removed a perverse incentive to private practice.
- Commissioning by GP Consortia rather than PCTs has many drawbacks.
- Capacity: GPs may understand their own services, but not the huge range of specialisms, nor the operation of the system as a whole;
- Accountability: GPs themselves are concerned about how the apparent conflict of interest between decisions about care and their ‘bottom line’ as businesses will affect relationships with patients;
- Managing demand: GPs are incentivised to get care out of expensive acute care and into the community – but will the services be there to meet these needs?
The NHS Commissioning Board (established in anticipation) will have to tackle these problems – but this is part of what the abolished PCTs did. Couldn’t they have done it?
- The fundamental basis of the NHS is being abolished. The duty on the Health Secretary to maintain a coordinated National Health Service is removed. Instead, regulation of the NHS will be carried out by Monitor, and will be economic: like other nationalised industry regulators Monitor will encourage competition and thus may actively prevent collaboration. Clinicians talking to each other about patterns of care, and Trusts agreeing on specialisations could be deemed anti-competitive. Services already close to the edge could close, with wide and damaging effects on service development and continuity of care.
- They will mean big cuts in health spending. Before the election David Cameron said: "I will cut the deficit, not the NHS" yet the cost of this reorganisation could be up to £3 billion. At the same time the government is demanding £20 billion in "efficiency savings" which only ministers believe can be achieved without affecting patients. This is being taken from patient care and leading to job losses – including clinical staff – across the NHS. Waiting times are already on the increase.
- Opening up the NHS to private profit. The Health Bill opens up the prospect of far more NHS services being organised and delivered by private companies. Taxpayers’ money destined for NHS patients will be diverted into shareholder profits.
- NHS patients will be pushed to the back of the queue. The Bill takes the cap off the amount hospitals can earn from private patients – so NHS patients risk being pushed to the back of the queue for care.
- It means competition, not co-operation. The Government wants to run the NHS through competition between different health providers and market forces. Bureaucracy, lawyers and contracts will replace co-operation and joint planning.
- It will create a huge postcode lottery. Under the proposals, the care patients can expect will vary from place to place, increasing costs and health inequalities and hurting vulnerable people the most.
- No-one voted for this: before the election we were told there would be no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS. Now the health service faces the biggest upheaval since its creation – so big that NHS Chief Executive David Nicholson said they could be “seen from space”.
Hospital Elections
There are 36 Foundation Trusts who take members from all over England. If we all join we could probably get people elected the the Governing Bodies. The running of hospitals will obviously become controversial, and this gives us a platform to get involved.