Yesterday I posted Save Lewisham Hospital’s campaigning tips on the Save Calderdale Royal Infirmary Facebook group, giving rise to a comment from a Huddersfield Keep our NHS Public campaigner:
“This is very useful and a real practical framework for us to follow”
So here’s a bit more info. Continue reading
At the Calderdale People’s Assembly meeting on energy efficiency and renewable energy last autumn, some people wanted to know about financial incentives from the government for installing renewable heating at home. Such as solar thermal, biomass or ground- or air-source heating,
This scheme is called the Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive and it looks as if it’s about to launch around Easter time. The regulations are due to be debated in the House of Lords on 26 March and in the House of Commons on 2 April. Continue reading
Like a bursting seedpod, Vera Chytilova’s death on 12 March 2014 has scattered her humour, fury, sense of the absurd and brilliant filmmaking skills onto new ground.
New Daisies will spring up. Continue reading
Have Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust come over all James Bond and confused the NHS with a Martini? Shaken, not stirred?
Right Care, Right Time Right Place is the name of their plans for closing Calderdale A&E, running down both Calderdale and Huddersfield hospitals and providing a low-cost Future Care System that seems to drop patients into the middle of a doughnut called Locality, while giving them money and control. Perhaps to buy in a few Martinis to drown their sorrows in this new low-cost Future Care System? Continue reading
Despite Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group’s public statements that it has not yet made any decision about the closure of either Calderdale or Huddersfield A&E department, and won’t do so until after a public consultation in the summer of 2014, this claim appears downright shaky. Think about these facts:
This was the message from Save our A&E campaigners this morning, as they walked with Labour Parliamentary candidate Josh Fenton Glynn from Todmorden to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.
The walk is to bring home the distances people will need to travel if the proposed closure of Calderdale A&E goes ahead. Continue reading
Yesterday the People’s Enquiry into NHS London published its report. This summary of the report, London’s NHS at the crossroads, is republished from the Open Democracy website under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. It is very useful for the campaign to save Calderdale and Huddersfield A&E and NHS – particularly in demanding a duty of candour for NHS managers and ending cash-driven closures. Continue reading
NHS England recently announced that it is “looking very actively” at how it can make Clinical Commissioning Groups get involved in commissioning primary care.
From September 2014, NHS England will hand over a role in commissioning primary care to Clinical Commissioning Groups. This handover is related to setting up a new system of integrated primary and community health and social care – just like the new system that the Calderdale and Greater Huddersfield Strategic Outline Case plans to set up.
It doesn’t seem to bother NHS England that this would create a clear conflict of interest for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), which are groups of local GPs; or that the GPs’ trade union, the British Medical Association, had just a week earlier said it opposed CCGs commissioning or decommissioning GP contracts because of conflict of interest. Continue reading
An NHS funding shortfall is driving proposals to close Calderdale A&E and “transform” Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS and social care system.
At the March 2014 Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group Governing Body Meeting, it was clear that “austerity” politics is driving the proposed closure of Calderdale A&E, and related moves to totally change the whole NHS and social care system. Continue reading