Immediate release – 29 June
Keep Our NHS Public is calling for its members and supporters to demonstrate outside a major national exhibition which reinforces the privatising of the NHS while claiming to be about ‘better NHS procurement’.
This P4H conference (http://www.p4health.co.uk ) on NHS procurement – where private companies secure NHS money for goods and services – is happening in Birmingham on Thursday 9 July.
Hundreds of delegates are expected. Dozens of private companies will be there, hoping to persuade health professionals and NHS staff on the wisdom of buying their services. John Warrington, Deputy Director for Policy & Research, Department of Health, is giving the opening address.
But far from being a forum in ‘providing both professionals engaged within the delivery of NHS procurement and suppliers to the healthcare sector with a unique promotional, educational and engagement platform to … optimise the cost of supplies and maintain high quality patient care’ as the conference blurb claims, this is in fact about the schooling of private companies in how to bid for then control NHS budgets.
National KONP Campaigns Officer and spokesman Alan Taman, who is also organising a Birmingham KONP group to fight NHS privatisation in the city, said:
‘This Conference is about the systematic, profit-driven siphoning off of NHS money when there is NO need for it. About running a “marketplace” in the NHS when nobody wants one other than the government and the private health industry.
‘P4H is proclaimed as a joyous celebration of innovative enterprise, with images of suited, canny businessmen and women dashing to the NHS’s aid, as it struggles to cope with its laughable and crippling inefficiency – which of course, ONLY private enterprise can put right. This is a lie. The NHS is already the most efficient way of delivering healthcare. It never needed rescuing. This is plunder dressed up as redemption.’
[Ends]
Editors’ Notes
Keep Our NHS Public was formed in 2005 and has a broad-based, public membership. There are 46 local groups, plus a national association. It has the explicit aim of countering marketisation [1,2] and privatisation of the NHS by campaigning for a publicly funded, publicly provided and publicly accountable NHS, available to all on the basis of clinical need. It is opposed to cuts in service which run counter to these principles. Further details: www.keepournhspublic.com
KONP’s Campaigns and Press Officer is Alan Taman:
07870 757 309
Twitter: https://twitter.com/keepnhspublic
Facebook: Keep-Our-NHS-Public
[1] Davis, J., Lister, J. and Wrigely, D. (2015) NHS For Sale. London: Merlin Press.
Leys, C. and Player, S. (2011) The Plot Against the NHS. Pontypool: Merlin
Lister, J. (2008) The NHS After 60: For Patients or Profits? London: Middlesex University Press
Owen, D. (2014) The Health of the Nation: The NHS in Peril. York: Methuen, Chapter 4.
Player, S. (2013) ‘Ready for market’. In NHS SOS ed by Davis, J. and Tallis, R. London: Oneworld, pp.38-61.
[2] The belief that ‘competition is always best’ does not work when applied to healthcare. A comprehensive and universal health service is best funded by public donation, which has been shown to be far more efficient overall than private-insurance healthcare models
[Davis, J., Lister, J. and Wrigley, D. (2015) NHS For Sale. London: Merlin Press. Chapters 2 and 8.
Lister, J. (2013) Health Policy Reform: global health versus private profit. Libri: Faringdon.
Pollock, A. and Price, D. (2013) In NHS SOS, ed by Davis, J. and Tallis, R. Oneworld: London, 174.]
Leave a Reply