Oh dear, my local Council (Labour) seems to have been caught with its pants on fire.
It circulated a leaflet Save Charing Cross Hospital. Here is the gist of it, extracted from the Council website.
Still fighting to Save Charing Cross
During the last two years, we have been fighting to save Charing Cross Hospital from proposals to demolish most of it and replace its A&E with an urgent care clinic – leaving just 13 per cent the size of the original hospital.
We commissioned a public inquiry led by Michael Mansfield QC that has provided a strong evidence base for why the proposals are wrong. Read the full report here.
We’ve refused to sign the ‘North West London STP’ – which has the demolition of Charing Cross Hospital and the sale of much of its site as a key part of their scheme. H&F Council has totally rejected this.
We commissioned a review of the NHS proposals and the STP – Read the review (pdf 4MB).
We are considering the case for a legal challenge.
I thought this was dubious – I was not aware that there were any plans to close Charing Cross and now the Chief Executive of Imperial College Healthcare confirms this in a letter dated 27th March 2017. Here are some extracts.
This material made a number of incorrect and misleading claims about the future of Charing Cross Hospital which is likely cause significant, unnecessary distress to patients and staff.
As you will be aware, there have never been any plans to close Charing Cross Hospital … a clear commitment that there will be no reduction in Charing Cross’s A&E department or wider services …
It is difficult to understand why the Council would choose to spend significant sums of pubic money fighting “closure plans” that do not exist. … through this letter we are raising a formal complaint with you regarding this publicity material and its content which we believe has clearly breached the Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity, specifically around objectivity and even-handedness. We request that you stop any further promotion of this leaflet and publicly retract your misleading claims. …
Yours sincerely, Dr Tracey Batten, Chief Executive Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust …
Oh dear, the Council will now circulate another leaflet telling me that chiropody, adenoids and acidosis care have been re-located to another hospital and that justifies their original pamphlet. The truth, as I see it, is that the NHS cannot continue to deliver free healthcare to everyone and maintain dthe highest standard. I don’t want to pay for private healthcare. I do want to pay when I use the NHS. If I pay it will subsidise those who cannot afford to pay. I am not allowed to pay because the NHS has become a sacred cow. Instead I pay through my tax bill and savings in other departments have to be made.
Cue for vulgar joke from The Little Red Book of Corbyn Jokes.
What’s long and hard and full of seamen? A Trident submarine minus any nuclear weapons.
Not entirely irrelevant postscript: there are Council elections next year.
I rather like the proposition that compulsory, commercial insurance will be the way health services have to go. That would be seen as rampant neo-liberalism by many British; and as rampant socialism by many Americans. As a policy, it would be nicely Beveridgean: it could be seen as flowing nicely from the spirit which informed the thinking of the generations which fought two World Wars, but which produced – from the late 1940s onwards – a stultifying statism.
As you say, co-payment will be part of the mix, I imagine; and so will state top-ups for the poor, and probably the feckless, and the trick of course is to have fewer of both classes.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard of this sort of thing. It’s similar in spirit and intent to the Corbyn ‘over-crowded train’ video (never mind that we all know that trains are over-crowded). I think that whenever this kind of thing happens, the people responsible should be heavily fined or disqualified from holding public office. Does anyone feel an ‘Internet Petition’ coming on?