NHS cuts and privatisation instructions snuck out after Parliament goes on holiday

Thanks to all who have supported Christine Hyde’s petition calling on Jeremy Hunt to stop the so-called Sustainability and Transformation Plans that will cut and privatise the NHS .

The threat is now looming larger. The government has just snuck out two major documents about the Sustainability and Transformation Plans, just as Parliament has gone on holiday – meaning the proposals have evaded MPs’ scrutiny.

Please will you sign the petition and forward it to 3 friends or relatives?
Along with a newer petition on the same topic from the national 38 Degrees campaign group

Thank you

The new Sustainability and Transformation Plan instructions – with no scrutiny from MPs!

1. NHS England’s Strengthening Financial Performance and Accountability in 2016-17 is a set of instructions for how to impose the Sustainability and Transformation Plans across England. It makes it clear that the Sustainability and Transformation Plans are to enforce the NHS cuts and privatisations set out in Simon Stevens’s Five Year Forward View (5YFV) from 2015-2020.

The STPs have to spell out:

• how each area or “footprint” will enforce impossibly tight financial controls on hospital trusts, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), and other NHS agencies to ensure they conform to central proposals for cuts and mergers between NHS institutions.
• how private sector and insurance friendly “new models of care” will be imposed in community settings, further undermining NHS hospitals.

The ultimate intended outcomes of this massive, dictatorial reorganisation process are privatisation, co-payments, charges, and insurance-funded care.

The second document snuck out since Parliament went on holiday is the NHS Improvement Business Plan 2016/17 . This says that a priority for 2016/17 is

“to facilitate independent sector providers to form NHS partnerships.”

ie use private companies to provide and transform NHS care,

“making use of new care models and innovative organisational forms.”

This is a reference to the Care Closer to Home schemes being rolled out across  England in various shapes and forms, along with new models of primary care like GP Federations that are set up as private limited companies to operate as “lead providers” in Accountable Care Organisations – a form of private/public partnership that is like PFI but for services as well as buildings.  It also refers to a “modern workforce” of lower-qualified staff in new grades of jobs, based on American  private health insurance schemes of so-called “managed care” – as well as major reliance on unskilled voluntary sector staff, family and friends.

Simon Stevens, the Chief Executive of the NHS England stealth-privatising quango, says he is:

“looking to fire the starting gun, which we expect to be able to do in October”*

This will be a race to the bottom, to cuts and NHS sell offs.
Together we must stop this!
Please will you forward both petitions to 3 friends or relatives? https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-the-plans-to-dismantle-our-nhs
https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/nhs-stp-petition?action=sign
Thank you