April’s General Meeting of Brighton and Hove Green party:
Noted with considerable alarm that the NHS has been forced into yet another major top-down re-organisation, imposed by Government and NHS England with no political mandate and no public consultation;with the requirement that 5-year plans for each area must include proposals to balance the regional budget (paying off in the process any outstanding deficits – for example the £37 million deficit of BSUHT); resulting in massive cuts to reduce NHS spending. This is the government hiving off all its financial responsibilities for the NHS to the 44 regions. Also under the Plan , new models of care set out in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View (5YFV) will be implemented although the pilots for these have not yet begun, and there is no reliable clinical or research evidence supporting these models.
Noted that the privatisation so far of the NHS has led to fragmentation of services, lack of clinical co-ordination for patients and competition between services. It replaces the clinical and administrative collaboration that has been a foundation for our hugely successful public NHS thus far. The market itself is hugely costly, diverting vital NHS resources administrative and legal costs and to private profit.
And voted unanimously to:
- Condemn in the strongest possible terms the proposals to implement the Sustainability and Transformation Plan in Brighton and Hove, the rest of the local “footprint” , and across England.
- Make the strongest possible representations to NHS England, the government, local CCG, HWB and the ruling Labour group about the destructive impact on the NHS the STP represents.
- Support local and national campaigns to fight the anti-democratic imposition of STPs locally and nationally.
Sussex Defend the NHS are organising a protest at the next Brighton Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) – Tuesday 24th May 12:30 at the Brighthelm Centre. We need lots of people to join us to say: No to STP (The disastrous Sustainability Transformation Plans) and Stop the shambles that is the privatised Patient Transport Service.