KEEP OUR N H S PUBLIC

Across England NHS patients and local communities have been linking up with nurses, doctors and other health care workers to meet, march, protest and lobby as they fight to stop further closures and cuts in local NHS services. Beds, wards and even whole hospitals are closing down.

Thousands of health workers' jobs are being axed.But alongside the cuts, an unprecedented process of privatisation is under way: vital services and precious NHS resources are being handed over to the private sector, including companies run for profit for shareholders here and overseas. Now is the time to fight back to Keep Our NHS Public!The campaign was launched in September 2005 and has won the backing of hundreds of senior doctors, academics, health workers and trade union leaders, celebrities, MPs and local campaigners for its launch statement. Now we are inviting all those who support our appeal to JOIN Keep Our NHS Public, and to work with us to build local broad-based campaigns that can stop and roll back the juggernaut of a government policy that is wrecking our NHS.We campaign for our aims and principles.

Chief amongst these:
To inform the public and the media what is happening as a result of the Government's "reform" programme.
To build a broadly based non-party political campaign to prevent further fragmentation and privatisation of the NHS.
To keep our NHS Public. This means funded from taxation, free at the point of use, and provided as a public service by people employed in the NHS and accountable to the public and Parliament. To call for a public debate about the future of the NHS and to halt the further use of the private sector until such a debate is had.
from Keep our NHS Public http://www.keepournhspublic.com

The Scandal of Mixed Sex Wards

Naturally, in an emergency, you would be grateful of a bed in any part of the hospital, even if it were in the corridor, although emergency beds are normally in individual booths. However, when you are moved to a ward, is it not reasonable to expect that you (or your teenage daughter or elderly mother) would be able to be moved to one that was caring for patients of the same sex as you (or them)? Despite the Conservatives in the 1990s pledging to abolish mixed sex wards, they didn't. Despite the Labour Party pledging in 1997 to abolish mixed sex wards it has now withdrawn that pledge, suggesting today that the only way to make single sex wards work would be to put each patient in their own individual ward.

What nonsense!

Once again our politicians are chipping away at all that was excellent about our National Health Service, pushing us into accepting this change "because there is no alternative". There is an alternative, that is voting for a party that will rebuild first-rate services for local people, including the local health provision, that is: Independents to Save Queen Mary's Hospital.