NHS Maternity services have been redisorganised into 44 Local Maternity Systems that are effectively dismantling comprehensive maternity services, introducing privatisation, removing women’s rights to the whole range of maternity services and replacing them with Personal Care Budgets for birth pools, place of birth settings or breastfeeding support.
But all of this should be available to every woman, regardless of a personal care budget.
In fact, all of these used to be available to women as part of the normal care given by the NHS.
The public health consequences will not be good. Jessica Ormerod explained the ‘Better Births’ scam to the recent Defend Maternity Services conference organised by Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. It’s happening in your area, so this is defo a must-read.
Jessica Ormerod speaks for maternity services as a public good.
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. My name is Jessica Ormerod. I run a research and policy analysis organisation called Public Matters with my lovely friend and colleague Deborah Harrington. We write mainly about the NHS but we are interested in all public services and keeping those service publicly owned and accountable. We also run an All Party Parliamentary Group for Health in All Policies. At the moment we are completing an inquiry into the Work and Welfare Reform Act. We see parallels across all public services in a systematic transformation (a word we hear all too often these days) to a corporate structure, a reduction in NHS provision and an ever widening landscape for private companies to move in and ‘fill in the gaps’.
I know I
have spoken to some of you before but…
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NHS MATTERS! 