Health News Blog

Please give to Keep Our NHS Public
Our NHS is in crisis and KONP needs to expand and intensify its fight to save it. However, without urgent financial help KONP's ability to campaign is under threat too. Please give what you can.

Say "No" to Palantir in your hospital
NHS England is insisting your health information is recorded and accessed by software built by Palantir; a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza. Do you trust Palantir with your health information? Find out here if your local hosptial is using it.

Ex MP "Labour is privatising the NHS"
Former Labour MP Margaret Greenwood says "Labour is privatising the NHS in plain sight."

Private borrowing to build clinics for NHS
Huge debts will be thrust on your local health authority ... it's PFI all over again, except now euphemistically called Public Private Partnerships. The Treasury said it would explore PPPs for “certain types of primary and community health infrastructure” to help bring “private sector discipline” to projects, otherwise known as screwing the NHS budget for years to come. 

Does your MP receive funds from private health firms?
These are the MPs we have been able to associate with the private healthcare sector through donations declared on the Register of Members' Financial Interests.

Stand with NHS staff
Please sign up to this Every Doctor campaign to support an NHS that puts people before profit, supports its staff properly, provides excellent patient care, and remains true to its core principles.

15K 90 year old patients wait 12 hours
Almost 150,000 people aged 90 and over in England are forced to wait longer than 12 hours in A&E every year.

The lobbying to bring back PFI in the NHS
Research by EveryDoctor shows how powerful private finance and construction firms are lobbying ministers to revive PFI, a model once condemned as a “catastrophic waste of taxpayers’ money”.

£80bn PFI bill for just £13bn of investment
This IPPR report is from 2019, but since Streeting is proposing to use private finance again for his neighbourhood clinics, it's worth reminding ourselves of the consequences. Some trusts are forced to spend up to £1 in every £6 on payments for their current PFI schemes.

A&E waits are 'a moral stain'
The Royal College of Nursing chief said this of the NHS, but really it's a 'moral stain' on this Labour government, to put financial issues before people's healthcare.

A&E waits: NHS leaders demand funding
NHS bosses are seeking an emergency injection of £3 billion and have warned ministers that without it patients will wait longer for treatment and hospitals will start rationing care.

The NHS is best!
What's so good about the NHS? It's top value for money, it gives care to all regardless of class. Read here about why the NHS would return to being the best in the world if funded adequately.

Dire state of US hospitals
A report by a US senator reveals that private equity, the buying or investment in non-public companies to gain maximum return, has decimated US hospitals by witholding funds. Now the NHS in it their sights.

Private interests in the NHS
Here's an authoritative round-up of the creeping privatisation of our health service. 

Subcos: Campaign victory!
A subco is where an NHS trust creates a wholly owned subsidiary company to avoid tax and to threaten staff terms and conditions. The government announced that will now only be approved “in a limited number of circumstances, and only when there is clear union support”. In effect, never.

Who pays for NHSE redundancies?
The Chancellor is resisting demands from Streeting to use more than £1 billion from the Treasury’s reserve to fund redundancy payments when NHS England is scrapped. The Treasury has declined his request for a loan to pay off staff.

Maternity crisis: How many inquiries does it take?
There's the Shropshire inquiry, the East Kent inquiry, the Leeds inquiry, now there's the 14 trusts inquiry. The NHS is facing an enormous £27 billion bill for maternity failings. We, and they, know it's underfunding and the resulting collapse of staff morale caused by understaffing and bullying management that's the problem.

10 YP: Alternatives to private finance
The 10-Year Health Plan will set up to 300 “neighbourhood health hubs". Trapped by their own borrowing rules, ministers will resort to private finance to fund them, despite National Audit Office concluding that PF2 (the revised version of PFI) is two to three times more expensive than public finance. Here are sensible alternatives.