'A Return to Desperate and Callous Rationing of Diagnosis and Treatment'
Hammersmith MP responds to proposed cuts in care due to NHS financial deficit
Hammersmith MP Andy Slaughter has responded to what he describes as 'a five fold attack on the NHS' after revelations that cuts in patient care are being planned due to a huge £122 deficit incurred in the current year.
The Labour MP says: " Having barely drawn breath after the marathon and victorious campaign to save Charing Cross Hospital from demolition, we find ourselves in what may turn out to be an even worse crisis for our NHS.
" This time the attack is on five fronts. Major cuts to clinical services. Last week I received an extraordinary letter from the NHS in north west London. An already dire financial situation has become much, much worse. The deficit for this year has increased from £51m to £112m and will mean brutal cuts in patient care.
"They propose to: limit GPs referring cases to consultants, and – if they do – insisting they send patients only to local hospitals. This will mean a lack of choice and longer waiting times.
"If you finally get to see a consultant, they will be restricted from referring you on to another specialist. These will be additional and immediate cuts.
"We have already been told that the urgent care centres at Hammersmith and Central Middlesex Hospitals are closing overnight, only five years after the A&Es at both hospitals closed.
"This is what the NHS in crisis looks like. A deficit more than doubling in the course of one year leading to swingeing cuts in basic clinical services. It is a return to the desperate and callous rationing of diagnosis and treatment we saw under the Thatcher and Major Governments.
" I am having urgent meetings with the management of the NHS and Imperial which runs our local hospitals, but this is catastrophic news. It gives the lie to everything that the Government is saying about investment in and support of the NHS. Imperial will need to spend
£1.3 billion to bring its five hospitals up to standard. Yes, that’s billion not million.
"Charing Cross and St Mary’s, Paddington are the most dilapidated having had little or no investment for the past nine years while the now-abandoned plans to demolish Charing Cross and rebuild St Mary’s were entertained. Over £4 billion has been taken from NHS capital budgets nationally to disguise the funding crisis in day to day spending. The bill for our hospitals alone is more than the total ‘new’ money the Government has promised the NHS.
" The deficit is principally caused by a rise in demand – of 25% in unplanned hospital attendances since 2015. You may ask why it has taken four years and more to spot this trend, but what is truly shocking is that the Shaping a Healthier Future programme, designed among other stupidities to reduce acute beds at Charing Cross by 95% and close its A&E, continued throughout this period.
"We now know the total cost of management consultants for this aborted programme was at least £76 million. Just to spell this out – as demand was accelerating, they did little to address this but instead spent tens of millions of pounds planning to cut the very services that were under pressure.
"I have just been sent a recent study that suggest management consultants make the NHS less efficient. Yet they continue to use these while rationing clinical care. I have written again to the Heath Select Committee to ask them to investigate Babylon GPatHand, the digital service that is based in Fulham but has poached over 50,000 patients from all over London and beyond.
"Last month they attracted $550 million from US private healthcare and Saudi Government funds to allow them to expand further – something they can do within the NHS thanks to the patronage of Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health.
"This is not just an issue for H&F. If this model – taking younger, fitter and therefore more profitable patients away from existing GPs to inflate the profits of overseas investors – continues, it attacks the viability of primary care or at least leaves it a second-class underfunded service."
You can read more from Andy Slaughter, including Brexit updates on his current blog and his Twitter feed @hammersmithandy.
You can read the letter from NHS North West London here.
September 13, 2019
September 13, 2019
