Hull public urged to fight to keep health services within the NHS
19th March 2010
The people of Hull are being urged to back the campaign to stop
community health services being hived off from the NHS to a new
social enterprise.
Unite, the largest union in the country, is lobbying the board
meeting of NHS Hull in the city on Thursday 25 March to protest at
the trust’s refusal to ballot its 1,500 staff over the social
enterprise plan.
Unite fears for the future of joined-up services in one of
Britain’s most deprived cities - with high rates of cancer, heart
disease, obesity and teenage pregnancy, if the social enterprise
experiment goes-ahead.
Services that could be affected include health visiting, mental
health nursing, children’s services, community pharmacy and sexual
health advising – and Unite believes that some of these services
may not be provided in the Hull area in future.
Unite, along with the other staff side unions, has continually
asked managers at the trust, which covers 250,000 people, to hold a
ballot of staff, as to whether they are in favour of transferring
to a social enterprise to be called City Healthcare Partnership and
due to come into being on 1 June.
Unite regional officer, Tony Randerson, said: ”It is clear that
social enterprises are a leap in the dark in terms of provision of
services and that the public has not been fully informed of what
this could mean in terms of these services being delivered in Hull
in the future.
”We are urging the people of Hull to get behind this campaign as
the very future of many NHS community services in the city are at
stake. Social enterprises are a half-way house to the privatisation
of the NHS.”
In other parts of the country where staff have been given an
opportunity to vote on social enterprises, the proposal has been
overwhelmingly rejected. Areas where staff have voted against
social enterprises include Bedfordshire, Greenwich and West
Essex.
Unite’s campaign comes in the wake of the Department of Health’s
announcement that the NHS should be ‘the preferred provider’ of
choice. This means that outside providers can only be asked to
tender if a trust is deemed to be failing and has not taken
remedial measures.
A social enterprise is a commercial organisation, one step
removed from the NHS that can win – and lose – contracts to provide
services to the NHS for a limited period of time.
If the social enterprise loses its contracts to, for example, a
North American private healthcare company in five years time, jobs
could be lost and services to the public could become fragmented.
The ethos of a NHS providing a unified, joined-up service for
patients could disappear.
Tony Randerson said: ”We want to make the public aware of what a
social enterprise will actually mean for families and communities
in Hull - one of the most socially deprived cities in the country.
Social enterprises can’t be imposed by stealth. The people of Hull
and the NHS staff involved deserve the widest possible
consultation.”
ENDS
NOTES TO NEWS EDITORS:
• Unite members will be lobbying the board meeting at The
Boardroom. The Maltings, Silvester Square, Silvester Street, Hull
HU1 3HA between 8.30 and – 1.00pm on Thursday, 25 March 2010.
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