privatisation
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Get your Clause off our hospitals! By Jos Bell
An Amendment hastily tagged onto the Care Bill, Amendment 168A (to be inserted after Clause 109) gives the power to any hospital administrator appointed in England to dismantle whichever hospital services they may take a fancy to, as long as they neighbour a hospital which is deemed to be failing. Continue reading
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How to abolish a free health service, step one By David Cullen
The Tory plan to charge migrants for NHS treatment has rightly come under fire for being policy directed at an invented non-issue; because it will therefore probably cost more money than it will save; and because it will change the doctor-patient relation in an insidious way – asking doctors to police their patients. Continue reading
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NHS: Your right to know By Grahame Morris MP
What has often gone unnoticed [in the privatisation of the NHS] is the democratic deficit. The erosion of our rights to question those who run public services and spend our money. This is what prompted me to introduce a Ten Minute Rule Bill calling for Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation to be extended to private… Continue reading
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NHS on the brink of extinction By Kailash Chand
In his speech to this year’s Labour conference, Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham confirmed that if the party wins the 2015 general election, he will introduce legislation to repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 in the following Queen’s Speech. Continue reading
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The NHS and You: The BBC wants to hear from you
The BBC is asking for your views on its news and current affairs coverage. This is a good chance to feedback any comments you may have on its coverage of the NHS Continue reading
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Asleep on the job – England’s young doctors and the NHS reforms By Guddi Singh
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 crippled the NHS as we know it. Without any mandate from voters the government introduced a top down reorganisation that enables the rapid acceleration of NHS privatisation. The right of private providers to profit from illness is the key driver of the so-called ‘reforms’. For the first time… Continue reading
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London Underground prepares mass closure of ticket offices By James Hatton and Paul Bond
Recent disclosures have again confirmed London Underground management is planning to close all its 268 ticket offices over the next two years. Around 2,000 jobs are expected to be lost during that period, with job losses across the rail and underground network rising to 6,000 by 2020. The job losses are part of Transport for… Continue reading
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Your medical data – on sale for a pound By Phil Booth
The government’s announcement today that private companies are to be given access to patient data for the princely sum of £1, is just the latest attack on the principles of patient confidentiality in the interests of commerce. Continue reading
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Paying for private failure in England’s NHS – again By Caroline Molloy
The NHS is paying millions to a failed private Treatment Centre to escape a contract after a series of patient deaths – and the figures don’t quite add up. Continue reading
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Billion-pound NHS contract offered to private health care providers By Joan Smith and Paul Mitchell
The biggest ever contract for the sell-off of public health services in England, worth between £700 million to £1.1 billion, is being offered to private health care providers by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) as part of its “Older People’s Programme”. From July 2014, six National Health Service (NHS) contracts that include… Continue reading
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After Mubenga unlawful killing verdict: Could asylum seekers have a worse landlord than G4S?
• Unlawful killing verdict • Jimmy Mubenga died after ‘restraint’ by three G4S guards • G4S gave disputed evidence to Parliamentary committee about restraint techniques • Lately executive Stephen Small dismissed allegations about abuse of asylum seekers housed by G4S Continue reading
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British NHS watchdog promotes privatisation By Barry Mason
The report that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) watchdog, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), suppressed one of its own investigative reports is the latest scandal to hit the organisation, whose supposed aim is to protect health and social care standards. Continue reading
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The MPs with a finger in the health service pie By Will Stone
As each year goes by it’s becoming more and more difficult to say that Britain’s health service is entirely publicly funded and free at the point of use. Continue reading
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Everything you wanted to know about the NHS crisis, but were too afraid to ask By John Lister
Since 2000 successive Westminster governments have used it as a test-bed for experiments with untried “reforms” aimed to transform it from a public health care system into a “market” – little more than a fund of taxpayers’ money to buy services from a range of public and private providers. Continue reading
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Book Review: Our NHS on the brink By Bernadette Hyland
Edited by Raymond Tallis and Dr Jacky Davis, ‘NHS SOS: How the NHS was betrayed – and how we can save it’ it is a difficult book to read. In chapter after chapter we see the way in which determined neoliberals have hacked away at a cherished British institution. Davis and her co-writers do not… Continue reading
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The EU moves to privatise water: the people mobilize
it has recently become known that the European Commission wishes to privatise the distribution of water across Europe i.e. to make water distribution rights something that can be traded on the stock market for profit. Continue reading
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Market Madness By Craig Murray
Three days ago I collapsed for the second time in two days; an ambulance was called and a paramedic arrived within 5 minutes, with a full ambulance arriving inside a further five minutes. The NHS at its amazing best. I am well looked after. Yet a couple of weeks previously I had an example of… Continue reading
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The commodification of crap and South Africa’s toilet apartheid By Patrick Bond
In central Durban, the mafia of the global water and sanitation sector – its corporate, NGO and state-bureaucratic elite – have gathered at the International Convention Centre, just a few blocks west of the Indian Ocean, into which far too much of our excrement already flows. They’re at the same scene of the crime as,… Continue reading
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UK Pathology Labs Suffer In Quality Under Serco Management
The privatisation of pathology services in two London hospitals has led to increased clinical problems and financial instability, an investigation by Corporate Watch, revealed in the Guardian today, has found. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 