Southport Councillor Tony Dawson is asking local people to give their full backing to Professor Stephen Hawking.
The Professor, together with a number of leading health care professionals, has just won permission to take Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and NHS England to court over controversial proposals to restructure the National Health S ervice in England.
Jeremy Hunt has tried to push through a plan to allow commercial companies to run health and social services across a whole region in what is effectively back-door privatisation.
Former NHS watchdog, Councillor Dawson warned of this dangerous tendency in Mr Hunt in a motion which he presented to a meeting of the Sefton Council last Thursday.
Professor Hawking and his friends say that an A ct of Parliament is required before any such sweeping changes can be implemented and changes to NHS regulations made. Lawyers from the Department of Health have tried to reject these claims but the High C ourt has now ruled that a full judicial review will be granted to determine the lawfulness of Mr Hunt’s proposals.
Under Mr Hunt’s plans the boundaries between different parts of the NHS that pay for and provide care, such as hospitals, GPs and clinical commissioning groups, would be dissolved. Responsibility for patients in these areas would be given to new bodies called ‘ Accountable Care Organisations ‘ (ACOs) . These could cause newly merged super-organisations , including non-NHS bod ies, being given contracts to manage and provide entire packages of care. These ACOs in turn could choose to either subcontract the service giving more opportunities for privatisation.
Councillor Dawson says thjat Jeremy Hunt is the ultimate advocate of George Orwell’s Newspeak. For the last five years, almost every year he has declared some failure or other within the NHS as being ‘unacceptable’ when he has actually just sat back and accepted it. Now he wants to create unaccountable bodies to carve up the NHS so he is trying to call them ‘Accountable’.
“If Jeremy Hunt was placed in charge of Crematoria he would call them ‘lifegiving devices’,” he says. “As for these new organisations of Jeremy Hunt’s, think Carillion, think Capita and multiply it by fifty.”
Dr Colin Hutchinson, a former consultant eye surgeon who is chair of ‘ Doctors for the NHS ‘ , sa ys that Mr Hunt’s proposals would “eventually affect everybody in England . There needs to be a sound legal basis before 10-year contracts worth billions of pounds are outsourced to these new organisations. We are delighted that the court has decided that our arguments deserve to be examined in detail,” he says.
Councillor Dawson has himself been successful in a judicial review against the NHS over their illegal failure to consult properly. He is far from alone in his concerns about what Jeremy Hunt is trying to do. Conservative MP Dr Sarah Wollaston , t he chair of the House of Commons Health Select Committee did not get a straight answer from Jeremy Hunt when she questioned him about ACOs . She h as written to the Health Secretary urging him to delay a new contract for Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs) – due to be implemented later this year , claiming there is a “great deal of concern” over the plans which she considers “have not been well aired publicly up until now”.
More:
https://www.otsnews.co.uk/health-secretary-hunt-faces-angry-protesters-southport-hospital/
OTS News on Social Media