On Saturday 28th November, Calderdale and Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS are taking to the street in Halifax, to protest against global management consultancy company EY (aka Ernst and Young) calling the shots over the future of Calderdale Royal Hospital and Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.
999 Call for the NHS activists and supporters are going to sweep EY out of our hospitals between 11am-1pm, on Southgate, Halifax outside Wilkinsons. Or in the arcade side entrance to borough market if it’s raining.
Members of the public will be able to find out to help stop the hijack of the NHS by global management consultancy companies and their health insurance corporate cronies, and to support the NHS Reinstatement Bill. This cross-party Bill has its 2nd reading in the House of Commons in March 2016.
It will restore the NHS as a fully publicly owned, publicly run health service, that is comprehensive, universal, free at the point of delivery, based on patient’s clinical needs, and that it is the duty of the Secretary of State to to provide. Restoring the NHS to full public ownership and management would save at least £4.5bn/year that is wasted on the NHS market bureaucracy. This money would go into patient care.
Anyone who’d like to take part in sweeping EY out of our hospitals, please let 999 Call for the NHS know either via the facebook event page or by emailing candk999@yahoo.co.uk.
Or just turn up!
The Great American Corporate Stitch Up of the NHS
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust is having to pay EY £1m for 3 months’ work dictating what cuts the hospitals must make, in order to get rid of the Trust’s deficit.
This is on the orders of Monitor, the NHS market competition regulator that put our hospitals into special measures after the Trust went into deficit – because it refused to damage patient safety by making huge spending cuts – aka “efficiency savings” – demanded by the government.
This kind of “consultancy” work is one of the most profitable areas of NHS privatisation. It amounts to a corporate hijack of our NHS.
This has been going on for years, since the 2000s when New Labour gave a big NHS role to private health companies.
In 2009, after the New Labour government had spent £trillions on bailing out the bankers, it called on the American consultancy company, McKinsey, to come up with schemes to cut £20bn NHS spending by 2015.
The McKinsey slideshow of its un-evidenced cost cutting schemes is here.
On the basis of a series of assertions, few of which were backed up by evidence, and none of which were seriously analysed to show potential costs and disadvantages, McKinsey conjured up both the “efficiency savings”, that the Coalition government imposed in 2011, driving our hospitals into deficit last year, AND the model for the “Right Care Right Place Right Time” scheme to close one of our A&Es and drastically cut acute hospital beds.
(The public consultation on this is due in Jan 2016 – if EY’s planned cuts don’t upset the “Right Care” clinical model apple cart.)
Privatisation of NHS policy making and strategic financial planning is one of the most profitable and most covert forms of NHS privatisation. It has recently climaxed in the corrupt privatisation of Commissioning Support Units, due to take take effect on April Fool’s Day 2016. This opens the door to the takeover of the NHS by United Health, the American health insurance company that is the ex-employer of NHS England boss Simon Stevens.