Tag Archives: NHS Cuts

Councillors! Test your understanding of #Calderdale Accountable Care System

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Calderdale Council Cabinet has resolved that the Council will take more steps towards setting up an Accountable Care System to run local NHS and social care services.

Dubbed a “place based integrated health and care system”,  it is due to be set up in shadow form in April and to go live in June 2019, according to a paper prepared for the 12.2.18 Cabinet meeting.

As the Cabinet resolved this issue in the meeting, Full Council will not debate or vote on it at its Meeting on 11th April.

Papers prepared for the Cabinet seem to have been written, in gobbledygook, by a student of Humpty Dumpty:

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Monitor wants to slash our hospital services – Calderdale NHS commissioners say nowt

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A crucial time for one of the main schemes to cut NHS services is now upon us.

From April 2016, NHS Foundation Trusts will be able to to stop providing certain NHS services, that are currently protected. This is due to changes to hospital licenses,  brought in by the hospitals regulator and competition enforcer, Monitor.

At the Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group meeting on 24th September 2015, Plain Speaker asked questions about how these licence changes are going to affect the range of services that Calderdale and Huddersfield hospitals provide.

Particularly: how this will affect Calderdale people’s access to comprehensive, universal healthcare that is free at the point of delivery and based on patients’ clinical needs. Given that it seems that services that are currently mandatory will fall away. Continue reading →

Hospital bosses’ “irresponsible” acceptance of £22bn efficiency cuts will harm patient care

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The Secretary of Calderdale NHS 38 Degrees campaign group has slammed a statement by Calderdale and Huddersfield hospitals trust’s Chief Executive and other hospital bosses across England, that they’ll accept the government’s proposed £22bn efficiency cuts in exchange for the Prime Minister’s backing for rapid hospital cuts and closures, and funding for “new models of care”.

Among these new models of care are Calderdale’s “Care Closer to Home” scheme, which aims to cut acute and emergency hospital services by taking services for frail elderly and chronically ill patients out of Calderdale Royal Hospital and putting them into the “community”.

Owen Williams, Chief Exec of Calderdale & Huddersfield hospitals Trust, recently co-signed an NHS Confederation letter to the Prime Minister where NHS bosses accepted the government’s £22bn “efficiency” cuts programme for the NHS, while calling on the new Conservative government to honour its manifesto promise of an £8bn extra funding/year to carry out the big changes identified in NHS England’s 5 Year Forward View, plus funding for “transformation” and social care. Continue reading →

NHS privatisation quango tells #Calderdale and #Huddersfield hospitals trust to cut services fast

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As Plain Speaker reported in early October, Monitor is to investigate the reasons why our Hospitals Trust is facing a deficit at the end of this financial year.

Monitor is the quango set up under the 2012 Health & Social Care Act, in order to open up the NHS to EU competition law as a way of speeding up the pace of NHS privatisation.

Moves by Paul Chandler, Regional Director at Monitor, to blame the Trust’s management for the deficit does not distract from the self-evident fact that the looming deficit is the result of central government tightening the funding screws on the NHS. Continue reading →

Let the people set the agenda for the remaining NHS debates by Calder Valley parliamentary politicians

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The first NHS debate between Calder Valley parliamentary hopefuls and the current MP Craig Whitaker ran along familiar lines.  The politicians repeated what they have already said several times in other situations.

There were only two unexpected comments.

  • Craig Whitaker MP accused Labour Parliamentary Candidate Josh Fenton Glynn of “schoolboy politics”, instead of repeating his earlier slur that Josh was a “stick of celery”.
  • The LibDem Parliamentary Candidate, Alisdair McGregor, said that in the next Coalition Government, which he seemed confident would happen, LibDems would push for the widespread roll out of Personal Health Budgets (despite the fact that the Dutch experience of Personal Health Budgets has been that they led to escalating costs and widespread abuse, with the result that the Dutch have radically reduced their availability – which Mr McGregor didn’t mention.)

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Walk for the NHS on August 22nd and 23rd – Used by us, Owned by us, Loved by us. Now the NHS can only be saved by us.

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Only Clowns Would Close Our A&Es, is the message from members of the public who are Walking for the NHS from Calderdale Royal Hospital to Pinderfields Hospital, via Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and Dewsbury District Hospital on 22nd and 23rd August.

The aim of Walk for the NHS is to make all 3 NHS Trust Chiefs aware that the public will not accept any downgrading of services, loss of services or back door privatisation of our NHS.

Let alone their intention of preventing any public consultation on plans to shake up the NHS in Calderdale.

Walk for the NHS will join up with the national Call 999 for the NHS People’s March when both groups arrive at Pinderfields hospital at 3.30pm on Saturday 23rd August.

Everyone is welcome to join some or all of the Walk for the NHS feeder march on any of the stages. Continue reading →