Privatisation of NHS Services
Debate between Paula Sherriff and Graham P Jones(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Paula Sherriff
Going back to my hon. Friend’s point about fragmentation, the service I worked in had pathways to the acute trust, so that if somebody came to us with something that looked malignant, we could refer them to the acute trust and the patient would have an appointment within two weeks. When Virgin took over the service, there was no aspiration or desire from the people at the top to create those pathways, so the patient had to go back to the bottom of the waiting list. Ultimately, it is a lose-lose situation for patients.
Graham P. Jones
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point and states the case well. My caseload of NHS issues is rising, and often they are about the gaps in service because of that fragmentation. Sometimes it is about poor service, or privatised services that are not providing what people once received when they were under the NHS. It is a complete disaster for my constituents; I have yet to meet a constituent who says that the changes since 2012 have improved the health service and are for the better. Everyone who comes to me—from all parties, of all types and from all walks of life—says exactly the opposite. The fragmentation, the lack of accountability and the cuts need to be looked at again. Healthcare inflation is outstripping the money going into the NHS, resulting in cuts and the STPs.
We are getting a different provider model for our local walk-in centres—it is starting to be swapped again. Our centre is a much-valued service but it is being closed, despite 23,000 people signing a petition. Its 42,000 patient visits will be transferred somewhere else—perhaps off to the second busiest A&E in the country. At the same time as all the fragmentation and chaos, we found out this week that in Clitheroe, the out-of-hours GP service is about to be closed, with patients being told to go to Accrington.
The fragmentation of our NHS is a complete and utter disaster. We are trying to outsource and privatise services or shift them to another trust and shuffle them around to try to save some money, but that will not save money. A patient visit at Blackburn A&E costs £120; it costs £60 at the walk-in centre. The change is a false economy. We shift more patients at the walk-in centre, but it is going to close. Where in all this is a system that is not fragmented, that is holistic and that thinks about the patient and puts them first? I completely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool: it is about time that we revoked section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act.