Unwanted birthday ‘gift’ for the NHS

ON Monday, to mark the NHS’s 74th birthday and its recent reorganisation, local people will deliver birthday cards to NHS leaders in the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland care area, asking them to give the NHS a birthday gift by kicking out private profit.

The Health and Care Act, which came into effect yesterday, organises the NHS across England into 42 new NHS bodies called integrated care systems (ICSs).

Each ICS will be overseen by an integrated care board (ICB). This new model will open the door to further privatisation of the NHS, with private companies allowed to sit on the boards.

We Own It, an organisation which campaigns for public services for people, not profit, is organising the birthday cards. It says 21,000 people have already emailed NHS leaders in the past few weeks, using their ‘Find My NHS’ online tool, and that the chairs of 11 ICSs have pledged in response that private companies won’t sit on their boards.

In its 74th year, the NHS is respected worldwide. But here and now it is in mortal danger and extreme stress – underfunded, close to 7 million patients on lists, patients dying waiting at every step of the journey and 110,000 staffing gaps.

The new integrated care boards are facing a funding crisis as inflation passes 10 per cent with no realterms funding.

This government undervalues the NHS and instead diverts billions to the private sector.

It has imposed a massive reorganisation despite two-and-a-half years of an ongoing pandemic.

We call on the boards of each new local integrated care system to keep private interests out of health care, to help rebuild the public NHS, and to protect it from private parasites.

We stand by the values of the NHS from 1948 and will not give them up – the right to health care for all who need it, when they need it, free from the fear of charges and driven by public solidarity not private profit. Tony O’Sullivan, co-chair

of Keep Our NHS Public