Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

The @Conservatives' long-term plan to destroy #Britain's #NHS & replace it with a private health insurance model is nearing completion.

Just add it to the growing list of casualties caused by Tory acts of short-sighted ideological vandalism. 🇬🇧

theguardian.com/society/2022/j…

The poor will make do with a dangerously underfunded #NHS, while the rich will hand money to corporations in exchange for profit-motivated superficial corner-cutting healthcare, from which, many @Conservatives with private healthcare interests will do VERY well.

A survey of more than 20,000 frontline #NHS staff reveals that four out of five respondents said staffing levels on their last shift were not enough to meet all the needs & dependency of their patients. The @Conservatives knew this would happen & failed to adequately plan ahead.

The findings also show that only a quarter of shifts had the planned number of registered nurses on duty, a sharp fall from 42% in 2020 & 45% five years ago.

Can you imagine the stress of going into life & death situations, every day, knowing there aren't enough staff to cope?

The RCN’s general secretary, Pat Cullen: “Don’t ever think that it is normal to not have enough staff to meet the needs of patients. It is not. Today, members are letting the full truth be known – nursing is saying loud and clear: ‘#EnoughIsEnough.’”

“It is your professional duty to be concerned about unsafe staffing & we have your back. 25,000 registered nurses left last year, a sharp rise on the year before, at the very moment we cannot afford to lose a single individual. The pressure is too great & the reward too little.”

Nurses are being driven out by staff shortages & poor culture. “To those from Govt listening to my words: we have had enough. The patients & those we care for have had enough. We are tired, fed up, demoralised, & some of us are leaving the profession because we have lost hope.”

Last spring, official figures showed that the #NHS was facing a deepening staffing crisis, with the number of unfilled posts across health services in England rising to 110,192.

What did the Tories do about it? Fuck all - because they live & breathe free-market fundamentalism.

Jeremy Hunt co-authored a 2005 policy book calling for our #NHS to be replaced by health insurance:

“Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private & public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of health care in Britain.”

independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

The @Conservatives learned a lot from New Labour, especially about the art of spin, & Jeremy Hunt's was very effective because the Tories know that British people are proud of & love Britain's #NHS, so the they couldn't just do their usual & simply announce it's privatisation.

Jeremy Hunt is portrayed - & portrays himself - as the earnest ex-head boy with a grasp of detail & an ability to get things done. After all, he tells us, he’s the man who “saved the #NHS”.

This is total bullshit.

opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/what…

Even the liberal media were taken in by the spin: in 2019, The New Statesman was impressed by Hunt’s “empathy” & “compassion”. The Guardian described Hunt’s “genial disposition” & “record of departmental diligence and attention to detail”.

The reality is VERY different.

Hunt's REAL legacy is one of missed targets, lengthening waits, crumbling hospitals, missed opportunities, false solutions, funding boosts that vanished under scrutiny, and blaming everyone but himself. Even pre-COVID, the #NHS had been systematically run down by the Tories.

Jeremy Hunt took over responsibility for the #NHS in 2012. By the time he left the post 6 years later, patient experience & staff morale had both taken a dramatic turn for the worse across many key indicators.

Winter crises deepened, with official figures showing 2017, 2018 & 2019 were successively “worst on record”. The British Medical Association (BMA) reported that by 2018 “the “winter crisis” has truly been replaced by a year-round crisis”.

#NHS rules say 95% of patients visiting A&E should be seen within a maximum of 4 hours. When Hunt took over the performance was just below target 94.9%, but worsened steadily during his tenure & was 84% by the time he left: the target missed every single month since July 2015.

Hunt oversaw years of historically low funding increases (around 1%, compared to an average of 6% between 1997 & 2010, & compared to the 4.3% recommended by the OBR, the Kings Fund, Health Foundation & Nuffield Trust, as the minimum to keep up with inflation & increasing demand).

Perhaps most damagingly, he oversaw a significant cut to the amount that hospitals were paid per procedure (payments making up three quarters of their income). In 2019, hospitals received on average 10% less for treating a patient than the treatment actually costs the hospital.

And when cash-strapped #NHS hospitals missed financial and performance targets that the Public Accounts Committee said were ‘unrealistic’, they were fucking fined! Something that – unsurprisingly – has been shown to do nothing to improve performance. This is deliberate vandalism.

Hunt claimed that hospital bed closures would be made up for by improved ‘care in the community’. But numbers of community matrons, district nurses & school nurses all declined under Hunt, & there was a dramatic drop in the number of community health visitors.

Hunt - as many @Conservatives do - ignored the fact that care at home requires more, not less, funding than care in hospitals, as reviews by the University of Manchester, the British Medical Journal, the National Audit Office and even the Department of Health itself have shown.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know beyond any doubt whatsoever that in vital but neglected areas of Britain's healthcare - like general practice, maternity & mental healthcare - Hunt routinely over-promised & massively under delivered.

In October 2017 Hunt told MPs "We've got 30,000 more people working in mental health today than we had when [Labour] left office" – a claim that was revealed to be false. He had inflated the actual number by around 43 times. But they don't care - lying is second nature to them.

Not long before leaving office, he won headlines for promising that mothers would get a 'dedicated midwife' throughout pregnancy & birth, though later reports suggested that this wasn’t the case, & that women were just being promised ‘one of a team’. In other words, no change.

Hunt called general practice the “jewel in the crown” of the #NHS, & in 2015, said “we want 5,000 more GPs by 2020” – in the following three years he achieved… 162. By his last year, the BMA described the number of GPs leaving their jobs as a "crisis".

Not long before his departure, Hunt deliberately misled & lied to Parliament when he said that #NHS privatisation “is not happening” & was “fake news”.

Evidence & his actions suggest he was always ideologically wedded to continued competition and privatisation.

An enormous amount of clinical & management energy was wasted in having to work to keep services from being chipped off by the private sector – even though such privatisation is a hugely costly process with no proven benefits.

debbieabrahams.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

A 2014 Inquiry into THE EFFECTIVENESS
OF INTERNATIONAL HEALTH SYSTEMS showed quite conclusively that where there is competition, privatisation or marketisation in a health system, health equity worsens.

There is also evidence of a negative impact on staff morale, where there may be conflicts in the values & ethos of a health system founded for social good, (rather than profit) &, for example, where some workers are financially rewarded for quality improvements & others are not.

There is no compelling evidence that competition, privatisation or marketisation improves healthcare quality; in fact there is some evidence that it actually impedes quality, including increasing hospitalisation rates & mortality.

After 25 years of an internal market, there is no strong evidence it has contributed to improvements in the quality of #NHS healthcare. There IS strong evidence that the additional transaction costs associated with a ‘purchaser/provider’ split, exceed #NHS savings made elsewhere.

From ambulances to eye operations, out-of-hours care to the #NHS’s 111 medical helpline, drug treatment & prison services to musculo-skeletal services, private firms are cherry-picking cash & ‘easy’ patients from the NHS – leaving the NHS underfunded & struggling to survive.

Virgin Care won almost £2BILLION of contracts during Hunt’s tenure, including controversial contracts to look after children & frail, chronically ill people across the country. Hunt personally intervened to help Virgin’s takeover of swathes of services in his own Surrey area.

2018 saw a 57% rise in privatisation cash overall. Hunt also attempted to privatise #NHS Professionals – the NHS’s own in-house agency & its last line of defence against profiteering temporary agencies – even as he told hospitals to reduce their reliance on agency staff.

I could go on & on about free-market fundamentalist Hunt's ideological vandalism, lies, obfuscations & attempts to privatise our #NHS, but you get the picture. Most of the above is taken from this article by Caroline Molloy on Hunt's catastrophic failure. opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/what…

What other possible motive do the @Conservatives have for privatising OUR #NHS? Continued support for their Party by the already grotesquely wealthy, whose interests they represent & who - like themselves - are itching to increase their returns on private healthcare investments.

A managing partner of private equity firm Livingbridge, Oluwole Kolade, which has extensive investments in private healthcare, has GIVEN £859,342 to the Tories, & in March he was made a non-executive director & deputy chair of #NHS England for 3 years.😬

theguardian.com/politics/2022/…

.@Conservatives love to claim to support the #NHS & say it is NOT being privatised, but they have personal & professional links to private healthcare providers, & in 2019/20 NHS commissioners spent £9.7BILLION on services delivered by the private sector.

kingsfund.org.uk/publications/a…

Since 2018, more than half the total £25 MILLION in funding of MPs’ all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) has come from the private sector, including healthcare bodies, arms companies & tech giants.

Money buys influence.

Britain is a corrupt state. theguardian.com/politics/2022/…

But what's wrong with people who can afford it paying for private health insurance? Surely it lifts the burden on the #NHS? Nope. #THREAD explaining why private health insurance is not the solution to Britain's deliberately manufactured healthcare crisis:

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1476205384989827072?s=20&t=v3uzkHHVadNd3jcB8NCs7g

Can we depend on Keir Starmer & Wes Streeting's New New Labour to save the #NHS?

This #THREAD takes a look at the contribution of Alan Milburn in particular, speculating about the extent to which a near-future Labour Govt may support privatisation.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1470498396192620549?s=20&t=v3uzkHHVadNd3jcB8NCs7g

Since March 2020, the Government has paid private hospitals - often with overseas owners - over £2BILLION for extra COVID bed capacity, while providing just 0.08% of the total.

Many of the providers are linked to @Conservatives.

bylinetimes.com/2021/11/12/the…

In 2014, the union Unite published a report in which it listed 64 Conservative & seven Liberal Democrat MPs as having links to private healthcare interests, including then PM, David Cameron, &, somewhat inevitably, then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/s…

Here's Liar Boris Johnson, who now finally faces a vote of no confidence, forcing Britain's Cabinet of Liars to lie on national TV about mythical "new" #NHS hospitals & "new" nurses & police numbers, which had been deployed to fraudenently win #GE2019.

In 2018, Tufton Street's Initiative for Free Trade (IFT), founded by free-market extremist Daniel Hannan, said Ministers should allow American healthcare companies to compete with the #NHS to run hospitals as part of a free-trade pact after Brexit.

thetimes.co.uk/article/let-am…