In Newcastle, the government’s widely ridiculed ‘listening exercise’ on the Health and Social Care Bill means little to people who are already finding it difficult to access essential healthcare services. The city centre walk-in centre, which last year treated 19,591 patients, and employed 26 staff, closed in May. The service was funded by the Department of Health, but delivered by private provider Care UK, with a contract value of £7 million. Figures on exactly how much Care UK made from the centre are not available as they are deemed ‘commercially confidential’, but overall the company draws 96% of its income from NHS contracts. In January 2010 company Chairman John Nash was exposed for donating £21,000 to the office of now-Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, and the company is doing very nicely out of privatisation. Recent contracts include a £53 million contract to deliver services to prisoners and young offenders. The reason given for the closure of the walk-in centre in Newcastle was ‘cost-effectiveness’. The closure of a centre treating thousands of patients has been dismissed offhand: ‘we felt that the existing GP practices and NHS walk-in centres that are now available across the city provide a level of service that meets the needs of people’ (Dr Mike Guy, Medical Director NHS North of Tyne). The fact that patients will have to travel further to visit a walk-in centre, or book appointments with increasingly oversubscribed GPs, is dismissed as irrelevant in the face of ‘considerable cost pressure which would need to be found from another service area’.
Elsewhere in Newcastle NHS services are being axed and not adequately replaced. The last services have now closed at the former General Hospital in the West End of Newcastle, with the site due to be turned into a massive Tesco alongside a ‘Campus for Ageing and Vitality’, in a £100 million scheme between Tesco, other businesses, Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Newcastle University. The two remaining wards at Walkergate Hospital in the East End of Newcastle have also shut, resulting in elderly patients being relocated to nursing homes around the North East, or having to travel to receive essential care, such as support with washing and taking medication. Despite an ageing population (it is estimated that in twenty years time, one in five people in Newcastle will be over 65), the specialist services Walkergate Hospital provided are deemed ‘no longer appropriate’; there has been no further explanation as to why long-term palliative care and rehabilitation services are suddenly no longer necessary for the same older people who have relied on these services for years. The closures become even more dangerous in the current environment; as private care homes face financial crises, local authority day centres close, and charities find their funding slashed, the gap in service provision caused by NHS cuts cannot be filled by other organisations.
Alongside the cuts to services, attacks on healthcare training will leave groups who should have access to specialised staff unsupported. The North East has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country, but this is not considered when making cuts. Not only has David Cameron not fulfilled his pre-election promise of providing 3,000 extra midwives nationally, the government have actively cut spending on midwifery training. Specialist care for young mothers becomes a luxury, rather than a right. The cuts to medical training are being made under conditions where people’s health is bound to deteriorate – increasing unemployment, poverty and associated depression. During and immediately after childbirth women who live in families where both partners are unemployed are ‘seven times more likely to die than women from more advantaged groups’ (Midwifery 2020). As people need more healthcare support, the number of professionals able to provide it is decreasing, forming a savage spiral and limiting accessible healthcare further and further.
The situation in Newcastle is of course part of a wider attack on access to services for working class people across Britain. We refuse to accept these cuts. We will not sit back and allow big businesses to make millions, whilst the sick and vulnerable are forced to suffer. We refuse to pay for the crisis, and let the drive for profits destroy our access to essential healthcare.
No to cuts – full stop!
