Defend Our NHS report : Theresa May’s launch of the NHS Long Term Plan should fool no-one

 

Dear friends of the NHS

Please read and share widely.

This email is based on press releases by Merseyside KONP and national KONP/Health Campaigns Together (to whom thanks) and information from the Defend Our NHS team.  The photograph is from the Guardian web site and the cartoon from the Times.

On Monday Theresa May was welcomed to Liverpool by Merseyside KONP, Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital campaign, Defend Our NHS and a hundred protestors who gave her a very clear message on her plan.

Protestors know the reality – and how things are getting worse. At Arrowe Park Hospital bed occupancy has been 99.3% against a safe level of 85%. And last year ambulances had to wait more than an hour to hand over their patient to the hospital 2,477 times, up from just 80 in 2013/14.

The Royal Liverpool Hospital has been on ‘Red Alert’ at least 25 times since 1 December. Bed occupancy is 92.3%, In December, 495 ambulances waited over 30 minutes to discharge their patients, and 135 of these waited over 60 minutes. Last week, some patients waited over 3 hours to be seen in A&E, and some in A&E waited 24 hours for a hospital bed.

In Liverpool a major problem is that the half-built Carillion PFI hospital was designed with fewer beds; capacity at the Royal was cut to match the plans. The Trust justified the cuts, claiming that Care in the Community would reduce demand.

And in Wirral the CCG’s proposals to slash services at walk-in centres will compound the problem.

May’s plan, written by NHS England Chief Exec Simon Stevens*, will replicate this all over England, shifting resources out of hospital, promoting digital technology (with the secretary of state Matt ‘Appcock’ anxious to replace GP consultations) and telling patients to look after themselves.

Rationing

Last winter, former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suddenly postponed all elective (planned) operations to ease the pressure on hospitals. Now, an NHS England document Preparing for 2019/20 Operational Planning and Contracting intends to ensure that ‘as much of [sic] inpatient elective activity occurs in the first half of the year, before winter’.

The document also includes a rationing plan for 17 NHS treatments no longer to be commissioned by CCGs. Trusts are also urged to ‘grow their external (non-NHS) income’ and ‘work towards securing the benchmarked potential for commercial income growth’. Hence the ward at Clatterbridge Hospital recently handed over to Four Seasons Health.

Trusts must set up systems to raise money by charging patients for treatment (‘overseas visitor cost recovery’) – a policy recently denounced by several medical Royal Colleges because of its impact on individual and public health.

Long term agenda

The 44 discredited Sustainability and Transformation Plans, re-branded as Integrated Care Systems, will hold the regional budgets to control NHS Trusts. ‘Planning assumptions’ in each STP area are to be agreed by 14 January. Neither the STPs, nor the ICSs, nor the Long Term Plan have been mandated by an Act of Parliament, let alone by patients or health workers. Yet, despite protests and clear evidence of the dangers, Wirral Council has charged at full speed into the STP and an ‘integrated’ partnership with the local clinical commissioning group. (We will be writing again soon about the ongoing legal challenge to this.)

The private sector could gain control of individual ICSs through long term contracts to manage the entire health system within one region.

Real integration of health and social care can only take place when the profit motive is taken out, with care fully-staffed and resourced, publicly accountable, funded through general taxation, and provided free at the point of need.

John Lister, editor of Health Campaigns Together said:

All of the main lines of what has been published or leaked about the Plan are a depressing re-run of previous plans and gimmicks: the only novel proposals are for more central control and less accountability, for trusts to run more like and with private businesses seeking profits, and to raise money by undermining the principles and values of the NHS through charging overseas visitors – a government policy widely condemned by NHS professional staff and campaigners as discriminatory and a step backwards from prevention and public health.

There is no reason to believe this plan, with even less local accountability and no serious plans for public consultation, will prove any more acceptable to the public or successful in implementation than the secretive STPs in 2016 or other previous failed efforts.

Campaigners have yet to see anything to recommend the new plans, or any indication NHS England is willing to come to grips with the crisis fuelled by chronic austerity limits on funding – or demand an end to chaos and fragmentation of the Health & Social Care Act.”

Dr Tony O’Sullivan, KONP Co-chair and retired consultant paediatrician, said:

The government has cut £7bn to social care and has underfunded the NHS by £20bn in annual funding over the last 9 years. There is no plan to repair the damage done. Platitudes about prevention and better health are exposed by the £1bn cuts to the public health budget responsible for prevention.

After 9 years undermining mental health, the ‘extra’ now committed is not new money but comes from elsewhere within NHS funding. Theresa May’s assertion that the NHS has never received higher funding is simply not true in relation to NHS funding required to meet need.

Over 210,000 vacancies in NHS and social care and unacceptable stress carried by staff, dangerous waits for A&E, cancer care and surgery, all tell the true story. And the fact that private health providers get 50% of their funds from treating patients diverted from an NHS deprived of the resources to treat them itself exposes the policy direction of government. We cannot accept this situation.’

Watch out for some further analysis of the NHS Long Term Plan which we’ll share by email to this list and on our Facebook page.

DONHS on Facebook

* Mr Stevens’ previous job? “His responsibilities include leading UnitedHealth’s strategy for, and engagement with, national health reform, ensuring its businesses are positioned for changes in the market and regulatory environment.”

 

Audit Trail of Destruction

The latest Private Eye reports that our very own local MP Frank Field has (quite rightly) been tearing strips off auditors/accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers  (doing business as PwC) in the House of Commons.

Their summary is:

As you can read for yourselves we once again witness Frankenfield’s flair for Gothic melodrama. “Waving his cleaver'” (oo-er missus!) as if he’s auditioning for the lead role in a remake of ” Mommie Dearest” ( “bring me the axe!)  – but then as we’ve said before he’s always been a Freudian case study waiting to happen.

Wirral Leaks readers will know that PwC are internationally renowned as the favoured go-to accountants of the tax avoider^[i] and money launderer^[ii].

So who does Wirral Council (with their chums in the Wirral Clinical Commissioning Group ) choose to undertake ‘due diligence’ (cue hysterical laughter) as they help to dismantle the NHS locally?

We really don’t need to give you the answer do we?  But we’ll give you a clue – can you spot the business acronym below?

How much did that ‘due diligence’ work cost us ? And have we heard a peep out of our local hero about PwC’s involvement in it?

Once again we don’t need to give you the answer do we?

Under the circumstances all we can say to Frankenfield is this :  If you’re going to play the people’s champion and defender of the NHS you have to be true to yourself and true to us. If not – what are you? That’s right – it makes you a duplicitous politician! But then we’ve long known that at Wirral Leaks!

^[i] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31147276

^[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/08/18/pwc-to-pay-25-million-to-settle-money-laundering-report-allegations/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.03f32dddcd

 

Muse Musings

How lovely of the local MSM to join the local party (and we all know what party that is don’t we boys and girls?).

OK so the Liverpool Echo and Wirral Globe are exactly ONE MONTH late in dancing to Martin Liptrot’s tune after Wirral Leaks exclusively revealed that Muse Developments were Wirral Council’s preferred partner – in what exactly? Wirral Growth Company – apparently !

Our thanks go to ‘Frankie'(not that one obviously) for saying this  :

I know you’ve moved away and hope your enjoying being away from the rat race…. just to give you an update looks like the clowncil are about to appoint the partner this being MUSE who seem to be the front runner in the shenanigans.

Loves ya leaky
Frankie

MUSE

Wirral Council placing public assets and development programmes under the control of a private company –  what could possibly go wrong?  Just don’t mention Carillion ! Full story here :  Dispatches from Dystopia

However it wasn’t us who noticed that the orchestrated media message about Muse Developments was embargoed until it could be better managed . As one of our (many) sources said after picking up the story from Martin Liptrot’s Facebook page : ” He’s headlines in all our local fearless news outlets today….”

Cabinet to consider appointment of Wirral Growth Company partner

Stunning new images

Isn’t he just ? – but we just wish he’d spare us yet more bloody artist’s impressions. Our favourite quote was from Wirral Council ‘leader’ Cllr Phil ‘Power Boy Pip’ Davies who is in the Liverpool Echo saying that the Wirral Growth Company “would be accountable to the public”.

Wirral Growth Company – A PRIVATE Limited Company

Well that would make a change wouldn’t it? We can’t even get a public body to be accountable let alone a private limited company. Moreover the Wirral Growth Company appears to be a one man operation (or should that be be one man bandit?) as it is registered in the name of the eternal Wirral Council frontman David Armstrong. A man who when it comes to being held accountable on behalf of Wirral Council at a forthcoming Tribunal said he’d call in sick if asked to do so ( didn’t he Rosemary?)

We’d also like to ask as to why Wirral Council had to resort to a solicitor in Bristol by the name of Christopher Harper (Bevan Brittan LLP )to set up this thoroughly flimsy looking operation.

Having said all that what we’re particularly interested in is the role of Power Boy Pip’s friend and neighbour Martin Liprot (aka Liptrotsky) who according to his LinkedIn page is no longer the ‘Lead Investment Officer (Interim)’ at Wirral Council and has now resorted to being a ‘Communications, Stakeholder Engagement & Public Affairs Consultant’. That’s ‘Spin Doctor’ to you and us. Although somebody still needs to explain how ‘Wirral. Well made. ‘ fits into all of this – even if it is Col Regis Davies ( are you still going with that hilarious nom de guerre, Martin?)

However at this point we really must direct you to Liptrotsky’s vainglorious Facebook page – 98 Republic

All we’d like to say is that you’d think a ‘Communications, Stakeholder Engagement & Public Affairs Consultant’ would know the difference between an ‘article’ and an ‘advertisement feature’ paid for by us wouldn’t you?

We’re left feeling that that we should send out a message to the various inadequate protagonists involved in this increasingly sordid story and ask them to listen to a song written appropriately enough by ‘Propaganda’:

Sell him your soul, sell him your soul, sell him your soul
Never look back, never look back

 

Frank Field : Fearless or Shameless ?

Now we’ve imagined that we would meet a grisly end courtesy of either a failed brakes incident as Her Ladyship and I cruised La Grande Corniche or a like a deadlier version of the opening scene to the film ‘Sexy Beast’ as we lounged in the Mediterranean sun.

However it would seem our readers have other ideas. Are you really trying to induce a coronary? We say this as we’ve received pictures from a Mail On Sunday reader – we’re a broad church and we don’t judge – yeah right! we hear you cry- but that particular publication isn’t usually part of our reading matter , especially when it regularly features their ‘pet’ Labour politician Frank Field.

Last Sunday’s edition exceeded itself as it features a full page spread of our beloved MP for Birkenhead under the headline – ” Fearless Frank : How I brought TWO Philip Greens down to size” and where we find Frankenfield adopting a macho stance (or as close an approximation as he can manage).

The TWO Philip Greens involved are the former boss of BHS , ‘Sir’ Philip Green and the Carillion CEO of the same name who isn’t a knight of the realm . Frankenfield is wringing every last ounce of self-aggrandizing publicity out of this isn’t he?  How ‘fearless’ do you have to be when you’re the chair of Work and Pensions Select Committee and what is it with Frankenfield and Greens? – beit Dave, Philip or the Green Party? Perhaps ‘Dear Papa’ forced him to eat his greens and he’s held a grudge ever since. And if there’s one thing we know about Foodbank Frank is that he ‘bears more grudges than lonely high court judges’  .

The hagiographic article written by the clearly impressionable William Turvill is jampacked with early entries for the Leaky Awards ‘ “Quote of the Year”.

Now if questions  A) and B) were posed to Wirral Council, Grant Thornton etc; instead of untouchable ,distant but headline-grabbing multi-millionaires we might have more respect for him*

* nb – let’s be honest it’ll be a cold day in hell when we have any respect for Frank Field 

A) 

B)

 

But our absolute favourite quote was this :

To which we would like to respond and say : Be careful what you wish for Frankie-baby! Although it must be great when Wirral Council (or rather their council taxpayers) are picking up the bill as a result of your scheming ways!

Dispatches from Dystopia

You do insist on sending us news about our former domicile. But where else would you go for solace from the dark foreboding place we know as the Wirral peninsula?

Whilst we appreciate we’ve found refuge far from the madding crowd you poor people still have to endure the madness. Nevertheless we promise you (and ourselves) that we will try and make sense of it all from a sunbed overlooking the Med and living the life of a flâneur – it’s a hard life but someone’s got to do it (as long as it’s not too much effort.)

However we tell you now you won’t get a look in once the temperature rises. So get your grievances and observations in before it’s too late!

First up we have a number of comments on the unfolding Wirral University Teaching Hospital  (WUTH) story (not that you’d know there was a story from perusing the local press) . Whilst it was obvious to us and others that there was a mahoosive problem years ago it obviously went ignored by senior management and regulators – because as we know that’s what they do. Denial may be pathological but for some but for others it’s a career path.

Wirral University Teaching Hospital – Leaks to Cascade

Sadly , it must be bittersweet for some of our contributors who have been ousted from their roles – be it nurses or trustees – because they dared to speak truth to power ( to the likes of former WUTH CEO Len Richards) and now find themselves belatedly vindicated only when their careers and livelihoods have been trashed. Meanwhile the bullies and incompetents go on to find themselves a lucrative niche elsewhere . Talking of which why do we keep coming across the name Linda Birch/Bryceland?

Meanwhile don’t raise your hopes of any improvement as NHS Improvement (!) are clearly in denial about the historical concerns that led to the current crisis as they have written to a prominent complainant and explained that cultural,behavioural and governance issues have seemingly sprung up from nowhere  :

Thank you for taking the time to contact us regarding Wirral University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Earlier this month we announced that Carole Taylor Brown will oversee the independent investigation into Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The investigation follows a number of allegations made to NHS Improvement about cultural, behavioural and governance issues at the trust, as well as concerns about the handling of a recent disciplinary case involving allegations of sexual misconduct. 

 The investigation will:

(i) investigate concerns raised by members of trust staff in late 2017 with NHS Improvement regarding cultural, behavioural and governance issues

(ii) review the trust’s handling of a recent disciplinary case involving allegations of sexual misconduct; and 

(iii) consider NHS Improvements’ response to the concerns raised with it per (i) above

Meanwhile we’ve had a message about Wirral Council from Frankie . Not that one, obviously – he’s got the starving mites to look after like a low rent St Francis of Assisi . This particular Frankie says:

I know you’ve moved away and hope your enjoying being away from the rat race…. just to give you an update looks like the clowncil are about to appoint the partner this being MUSE who seem to be the front runner in the shenanigans.

Loves ya leaky
Frankie

MUSE

Wirral Council placing public assets and development programmes under the control of a private company –  what could possibly go wrong?  Just don’t mention Carillion !