More Cuts and Bruises for the NHS
By Mercia — It is reported that the NHS has budgeted a staggering £2 billion to fund a huge programme of redundancies as austerity measures start to bite.
The Department of Health has confirmed that NHS trusts have been instructed to allocate 2 percent of their funding to meet the costs of staff lay-offs.Meanwhile, data gleaned from some 25 NHS trusts across the country suggest that in a worse case scenario over 30,000 jobs could go in a bid to save money.
This follows on from the recent revelation from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) that thousands of jobs would be cut within the NHS if trusts are to achieve the £15-£20 billion savings demanded of them over the next three years.
Because trust managers have been empowered to decide where the cuts will fall, it is widely feared that clinicians, rather than administrators, will bear the brunt of the cutbacks which will lead to an even poorer service for NHS patients.
In Scotland some 5,000 NHS posts are said to be at risk.
Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS trust, for instance, has been reported as planning to cut over 1,200 jobs this year — including almost 700 nurses and midwives.
Incredibly, a spokesman for the trust is on record as claiming: “By redesigning our services, including a move for some services onto fewer sites, we have identified that we can provide the same high quality care for our patients with fewer staff — 700 (fewer) in 2010–11 year, rising to 1,252 over 18 months.”
What is abundantly clear to most people is that if you cut clinical staffing levels then the standard of patient care must decline — how any NHS trust can adequately manage following the loss of around 700 nurses and midwives remains an, as yet, unexplained mystery.
Meanwhile, the silence from Westminster over the proposed scale of NHS cuts is astounding; perhaps for the reason that as the majority of parliamentarians have “gone private” the continuing deterioration of NHS services are unlikely to affect them personally.
The BNP demands the scrapping of the currently “ring-fenced” multi-billion pound foreign aid budget and the diversion of these funds into restoring the NHS back to the world-class health service it once was.
