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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2019 16:44:35 GMT
www.thegreennunhead.org/news/sell-off-screening-and-q-and-a-tuesday-27-august-7pm/Sell Off’ is a one hour film by Peter Bach about the selling off, privatisation of our health service, and dismantling of our NHS. The film is just under an hour long, and charts how successive governments have operated over a 30 year period. This documentary is split into 10 chapters, and features many health professionals on the front line. Following the film our speakers will update the audience as to the situation today, what is happening on a local level, and will inform the audience as to what we can do to save what’s left of our NHS. This event is a call to action, as this will effect everyone in the country. Dr Bob Gill will be the main speaker, is featured in the documentary, and is the best campaigner out there.
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2019 8:08:28 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 21, 2019 16:26:29 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 9, 2019 10:13:12 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 14, 2019 10:56:58 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 4, 2020 16:59:13 GMT
Children refused NHS mental health care for not being unwell enough GPs warn more children need help as research finds most trusts in England restrict referrals ‘Children with mental health problems must be severely unwell before they can get help at NHS trusts across England, an investigation has found. Data obtained via freedom of information requests shows a third of mental health trusts only accept patients with “severe” or “significant” conditions for specialist child and adolescent mental health services. The research conducted by Pulse – a specialist publication for doctors – analysed data on referral criteria used by 29 of the 56 facilities in England. Just one in five (six NHS mental health trusts) accept referrals for children with all levels of conditions.’ www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/03/children-refused-nhs-mental-health-care-for-not-being-unwell-enough
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Post by Admin on Feb 26, 2020 16:16:17 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2020 22:37:24 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 23, 2020 13:56:27 GMT
How to Destroy a National Health Service Over several decades, a toxic combination of underfunding and stealth privatization efforts have brought Britain’s widely beloved NHS to its knees. By Natasha Hakimi Zapata www.thenation.com/article/world/destroy-britain-nhs-privatization/"Soon after Covid-19 started to sweep through the United Kingdom in March, thousands of residents began appearing at their windows every Thursday to applaud the National Health Service. While the pandemic has evidently caused a wave of renewed appreciation for the NHS, the universal health care system has been a source of immense British pride for over 70 years. What many Britons fail to realize, however, is that some of the past and present government officials clapping alongside them, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have had a hand in the decades-long efforts to privatize their beloved NHS. Founded in 1948 by the Labour Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, the NHS rose from the ashes of World War II as part of a welfare state designed to slay the “five giant evils” outlined by the economist William Beveridge: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness. As Bevan envisioned the NHS, it would provide world-class medical care that was always “free at the point of delivery” for everyone, including nonresidents, overturning a system in which the majority, especially women and children, could not afford health care. With these principles at its core, the 1946 National Health Service Act lay the foundation for a radical redistribution of wealth by funding the service through a progressive tax on income. In its original iteration, the government transferred ownership of all existing hospitals in Britain to the NHS, which then employed staff, using taxpayer money, to deliver services without charging out-of-pocket fees. Some charges were implemented soon after its founding, including fees for dentures and glasses, as well as prescription payments brought in by Winston Churchill. Although many conservatives, including Churchill, opposed the idea of a fully public service, the story of the private sector’s incursion into Britain’s health service started on Margaret Thatcher’s watch. “The privatization of the NHS began in the 1980s,” says Professor Allyson Pollock, author of NHS plc: the Privatisation of Our Health Care, “and it’s been an incremental process over several decades where there’s been an ideological commitment to the private sector despite great opposition from the public.” Although Thatcher promised Britons the NHS was “safe with us,” it has since been revealed that she commissioned an American right-wing think tank to draw up privatization plans, including a proposal that promised it “would, of course, mean the end of the National Health Service.” Thatcher, much like her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, was a staunch believer in free market principles and aimed to introduce them into everything from housing to hospitals. While she was ultimately prevented by its immense popularity from privatizing the NHS outright, her government began to chip away at the foundation of the public health service to create an opening for the private sector. Low-wage services such as catering and cleaning were the first to be outsourced in 1983. These may seem irrelevant to health outcomes, but they serve as an example of the dangers outsourcing can represent to public health. In 2016, a University of Oxford study revealed that the deadly MRSA “superbug” was more than twice as prevalent in hospitals that had replaced in-house cleaning staff with low-cost contractors that were able to slash prices by underpaying staff and providing worse labor conditions."
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Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2020 11:03:08 GMT
The NHS is 72: why we must fight to defend it July 4, 2020 Written by John Westmoreland Published in Opinion www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/21378-the-nhs-is-72-why-we-must-fight-to-defend-itAs the NHS turns 72, it is under threat from the free-market dogma that has been underfunding and privatising it, writes John Westmoreland The NHS came to life on July 5, 1948. When we celebrate the birth of the NHS, we are celebrating an ideal. Many would think of the NHS provision of health care free at the point of delivery as a socialist ideal, one that rises above the sordid calculation of profit and loss that blights just about everything else in our lives.
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Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2020 17:29:58 GMT
Aneurin Bevan on the Socialist Ambitions of the NHS An interview with Aneurin Bevan On the 72nd anniversary of the NHS, we republish an interview with its founder, Aneurin Bevan, in which he describes the socialist ambitions that influenced its creation. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/aneurin-bevan-on-the-socialist-ambitions-of-the-nhsOn the 72nd anniversary of the NHS, there is no scarcity of praise for the greatest social achievement in Britain’s history – but amid the avalanche of articles readers would find precious little mention of its socialist roots. Aneurin Bevan, the minister responsible for its creation, suffered from no such timidity. He described the National Health Service as “a piece of real socialism,” and spoke of how it stood “opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.” For Bevan, the National Health Service was a radical endeavour, an effort to decommodify healthcare and make it not only public but free and universal. So committed was he to this principle that he resigned from the government over the introduction of prescription charges in 1951. Longtime confidant Michael Foot would write of Bevan’s politics that “His Socialism was rooted in Marxism; whatever modifications he had made in the doctrine, a belief in the class struggle stayed unshaken. Marxism taught him that society must be changed swiftly, intrepidly, fundamentally, if the transformation was not to be overturned by counter-revolution.” In this interview, published in Tribune on July 2nd 1948, just a few days before the NHS came into being, Bevan makes those influences clear. Placing its creation in the context of a broader social transformation aimed at empowering workers – and diminishing what Marx referred to as “the wages system” – Bevan describes the NHS as “the most revolutionary feature of the British Socialist programme.”
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Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2020 17:35:59 GMT
The NHS was founded 72 years ago today – after a long struggle led by socialists against Britain’s healthcare profiteers. How the NHS Was Won By Ronan Burtenshaw On the 72nd anniversary of the NHS, we remember the struggle that brought it into being – and how socialists overcame the healthcare profiteers to build the world's first free, public and universal system. tribunemag.co.uk/2019/07/how-the-nhs-was-wonIn the decades before the National Health Service (NHS), health care in Britain was guided by very different ideas. Most of the country’s hospitals were grim Victorian centres for the destitute, derived from workhouse infirmaries established under the Poor Law. This 1834 statute saw poverty as a moral failing — and one that should be punished with hard labour. The Royal Commission report which preceded its passage summed up its perspective: “every penny bestowed, that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer, is a bounty on indolence and vice.” The rich avoided the nightmare of the workhouse infirmary by using private doctors, who would often perform surgeries as well as more general practice on house calls. But for a growing proportion of Britain’s workers and poor, the infirmary became the norm for hospital care. When the medical journal the Lancet was given leave to form a commission of examination into their conditions in 1865, they dubbed the infirmaries “a disgrace to our civilisation.” The facilities, they said, “sin by their construction, by their want of nursing, by their comfortless fittings, by the supremacy which is accorded to questions of expense, by the imperfect provision made for skilled medical attendance on the sick, by the immense labour imposed on the medical attendants, and the wretched pittances to which they are ground down.”
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Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2020 23:39:14 GMT
Ronan Burtenshaw @ronanburtenshaw·
Aneurin Bevan was a Marxist who was expelled from the Labour Party for being too left-wing and demonised by the press for building the NHS. If he was still alive today he’d be condemned as a dangerous radical - by the same charlatans who lavish praise on him on days like this.
When you talk about Bevan’s expulsions from the Labour Party, people refer back to 1939 and the Popular Front. But the fact is the Labour Right were trying to expel him throughout the 1950s - after he had built the NHS. They came within one NEC vote of doing it in 1955.
The Guardian, for example, absolutely despised "Bevan and the hate-gospellers of his entourage." They ran a vicious anti-socialist campaign against him throughout the 1950s and advocated a vote for the Tories in case he might become PM under a Labour govt.
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Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2020 9:29:40 GMT
The NHS is failing ‘all those it was set up to serve’, concludes government review By Matt Discombe8 July 2020 The NHS has “either lost sight of the interests of all those it was set up to serve or does not know how best to do this”, a major government-commissioned review has concluded. www.hsj.co.uk/patient-safety/the-nhs-is-failing-all-those-it-was-set-up-to-serve-concludes-government-review/7027998.articleBest privatize / get rid of the NHS then. Nothing to do with 40 years of hard right neoliberal Crapitalism & the Tories wanting to get rid of the NHS / Welfare system since it was set up. Still - this is what the majority of people have voted for for 40 years.
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Post by Admin on Jul 10, 2020 20:39:26 GMT
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