NHS 75 – ONLINE KEEP OUR NHS PUBLIC RALLY

July 5th is the 75th birthday of our NHS, sadly it is not a time to celebrate.

 

Our health care service was once ranked the best in the world, but since 2015 it has fallen to 10th place globally and is falling fast. We are now faced with hundreds of preventable and avoidable deaths happening every week. There is a major staffing crisis with over 132,000 staffing vacancies, and over 7 million on waiting lists. No wonder staff are either leaving their professions or striking to save their pay and conditions and to stand up for the NHS itself.

This year also marks the 75th anniversary of Windrush – the arrival of the generation of Commonwealth citizens who helped to transform our public services and build our NHS. We plan to pay tribute to them and thank today’s diverse and multicultural workforce. It’s one of the things that has made our NHS great in the past – and we must make sure it continues to do so. Now, more than ever, it is vital that we stand together to defend our NHS from those who seek to undermine its core values. We need a fully public NHS – because this is how we protect the pay, conditions and it’s also how we protect it for patients too. It’s the only way the NHS will survive.

We don’t need more plans to restructure and reform, we need to reinstate the NHS as a fully public service. And our vision is for an NHS that goes even further, we want to ensure prescriptions are free on the NHS again, rebuild NHS dental care for all and to see a national care, support and independent living service and much more. This isn’t time to ‘reform or retreat’ , it’s time to return to founding principles.