On behalf of the Aneurin Bevan Society.
Recent events have placed our National Health Service in serious jeopardy.
Following the Francis Report into the failings in Stafford Hospital the NHS was instructed to restore staffing levels to ensure safe patient care. However, hospitals are now being told to shed staff to rescue the NHS from an acute funding crisis, leaving nurses and other frontline medical workers at risk of losing their jobs. This is taking place despite intense concern among hospital bosses and health unions that reducing staff will hit quality of care, patient, and staff morale while increasing waiting times.
Additionally, for some years there has been a growing consensus among health professionals that Health and Social Care should be provided through one budget and an all party Commission was at the point of being set up.
However, the government has now created a new Minister to run “Communities and Social Care. This means that already strapped for cash local authorities will be responsible for all local social care provision. This at a time when they are enduring fierce cuts in government grants that will decimate all services and will result in further hospital bed blocking.
“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”
These words were spoken by the then Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan in 1948, as his dream of creating a National Health Service became a reality.
Support campaigns to both work for and defend the NHS from attack:
KEEP OUR NHS PUBLIC
07497 434 6304
SOCIALIST HEALTH ASSOCIATION