How to rescue the NHS
It seems the new government is determined to echo the Tories’ grim commitment to austerity, while allowing the super-rich and corporations to get even richer. Regarding the NHS, no amount of 'reform' (code for privatisation) will avoid the need for substantial investment for Starmer’s Labour to make real progress.

Findings of Health Foundation report
1) The public’s views of the standard of NHS care and expectations for the future are already low; 2) waiting times of routine services to get worse in coming year: 3) Top priorities for the NHS are reducing the number of staff leaving the NHS by improving working conditions and making it easier to get appointments at GP practices.

Privatisation of mental healthcare
More than £1.4 billion has been spent on private mental health beds between 2019 and 2024 by the NHS in England. In that time, spending had risen by 68%.

Trust 'Too compassionate' to run services
...so East Suffolk and North Essex is out-sourcing its cleaning, catering and portering services. It plans to replace kindly and reasonable management with tough privatised exploitation. So staff are striking over the plan to privatise their jobs; please sign a petition of support.

Private sector not the solution
1) The private sector does not train and recruit its own workforce, it relies on NHS-trained health workers to deliver its services. 2) private sector delivery of care is commonly more expensive than when the NHS does it itself. It means our taxes are going out the door of the NHS and into the pockets of shareholders execs. 3) Private providers reject patients with more complex and therefore resource-draining needs; in other words they cherry-pick. For more click here.

NHS private profits: £10 billion a week
A new analysis by We Own It reveals that £6.7 billion, or £10 million each week, has left the NHS’s budget in the form of profits on all private contracts given by the NHS from January 2012 to May 2024.

Think Milburn is good for the NHS?
Then think again. Here's a run down of Alan Milburn's effect on the NHS, his support for greater private sector involvement, of expanding PFI in the NHS saying "[PFI] is cheaper, better, better value for money.. We know different don't we.

NHSE instructs trusts to use FDP
This article is behind a paywall. It tells us that a £330 million contract to provide the FDP was awarded to US firm Palantir last November. NHS England has told trusts they must begin to use the national Federated Data Platform and its analytic products within two years. The move to require its use marks a sharp departure from the approach taken at the platform’s launch. One comment added  "...[the FDP] program remains operationally unproven. It offers a tiny number of things that Trusts neither want nor need, Is delivered by a supplier they don’t trust..."

Two child benefit cap and hospital admissions
A study demonstrates that curbing child poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap would save hundreds of lives a year and avoid thousands of admissions to hospital.

Why privatisation won't solve the NHS crisis
The new Health Secretary Wes Streeting claims that the answer lies with the private sector.  He also said that Labour would "hold the door open" for the private sector in the NHS, pledging that if elected they would use “spare capacity" in the sector to cut the NHS waiting lists. But the private sector preys upon the NHS for staff, so if the waiting list demand is directed onto the private sector, more staff will be poached from the public NHS. For more, see here.

The PFI  scandal
Under PFI, rather than borrowing to build, the government contracts with the private sector to finance, design, build and maintain public assets. These have ranged from hospitals, schools, roads, prisons. But are PFI contracts value for money? The National Audit Office (NAO) scrutinises public spending. Seventeen NHS trusts have already paid out at least the full cost of building new hospitals, but still face years of increasingly heavy payments under the PFI contracts.

Does the NHS want reform, or proper funding?
NHS  "reform" is often code for more privatisation, resulting in syphoning off NHS funds for private profit. How does our health spending compare? Average day-to-day health spending in the UK between 2010 and 2019 was £3,005 per person – 18% below the EU14 average of £3,655. Matching spending per head to France or Germany would have led to an additional £40bn and £73bn (21% to 39% increase respectively) of total health spending each year in the UK.

Covid Inquiry: appalling failures during pandemic
The inquiry has been told of a catalogue of failures in prearing for the pandemic during years of austerity under the Tories and the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. "There is no doubt that the provision of PPE to healthcare workers during the pandemic was hopelessly inadequate",

NHS: "The whole service may collapse"
The NHS’s finances are so dire that the whole health service may break unless it receives a massive cash injection. So said the National Audit Office, the watchdog to oversee government spending. The Health Foundation says the NHS will need £38bn more a year than planned by the end of the next parliament in order to cut the care backlog and end long treatment delays.

The NHS must be set back on its feet once more
Here's a reaction to the election of a Labour government from Keep Our NHS Public. "Delivering on health care is a good place to start, and it is an urgent priority to fully invest in the NHS, including committing to full pay restoration for NHS staff."

Labour's NHS pledges analysed
"Blair-Brown government [NHS] performance was improved precisely by increasing funding and investing in staff, making the NHS one of the best services in the world" ..."Myths of unaffordability and the efficiency of privatised services need to be dispelled and the vital role of public health reaffirmed."

How privatised eye care hurts the NHS
"The effect of outsourcing - a ‘hollowing out’ of NHS eye care departments due to the loss of income and activity from cataract care has the potential to leave the NHS eye care departments as a ‘poor service for poor people’.

Why not privatise the NHS?
For an analysis of why privatising the NHS a) gives a poorer service b) is poor value for money, and c) the effect upon the publicly provided NHS, see this Keep Our NHS Public briefing.

Rolling back privatisation
Campaigner John Lister points out Labour's Manifesto commitment to roll back privatisation in public services. "Before any service is contracted out, public bodies must carry out a quick and proportionate public interest test, to understand whether that work could not be more effectively done in-house." We wait to see it carried out for privatised NHS services!