Our campaign wants to protect and improve health care for women and babies in Liverpool, Merseyside and the surrounding areas. To do this we must also protect and improve the NHS locally and nationally. We can’t have one without the other.We want to keep our hospital, not to be part of a city wide hospital, but we need a fully funded NHS to get this.

Just as we work for maternity issues nationally, we care for the NHS nationally

We care about is happening locally to the NHS. The mess ups and damage could fill a book.There have been some staff change in the local managers but its still the same people.

We know the NHS is in crisis this winter. Running down the NHS is part of the strategy to take the NHS into the private sector to make money for the very rich.

But how does all this affect women and babies using the Liverpool Women’s Hospital?
We need well-funded care, the best available treatments, from well-trained, well paid and well rested staff. We need the safest equipment and a building and grounds that are place of healing and respect.

This is not a pipe dream. It is easily affordable if our government funds the NHS at the same kind of level as it did in 2009.The government would need to stop paying billions to private business and bring the NHS back ” in-house” and repeal current legislation.

So what is going on with this big suggested merger?

There are great big faults in the NHS from recent policies. We have to thank the staff for sticking at their work and keeping a deliberately holed ship afloat

Far too many beds have been removed from the system locally and nationally. Its been a mantra of the current NHS management to cut beds and its been a disater.

The internal market in the NHS has been immensely costly and inefficient.

The trusts model of hospitals just has not worked. Many are in debt. Just two years ago these debts were described as catastrophic, now they are normal and reflect reality under funding or cuts.

NHS privatisation is like a leaky pipe watering a rich man’s garden.

There are so many kinds of privatisation in the NHS it is difficult to count them all, but the NHS is like a leaky pipe system watering the rich man’s garden. There is the leak that lets them cut wages and pensions for privatised staff, the leak that lets private companies take their profit from a contract, the leak that happens when the service is rationed and so many more. All money from the NHS going into private pockets of big corporations is less money for  patients and staff..

The NHS has shed money staff and resources into many companies and corporations but it is still a complex organisation.

It is one of the largest employers in the world out matched only by the likes of MacDonald and Wal-Mart, and Macdonald’s don’t employ employees with the kind of skills needed in the NHS.

It is an immensely valuable asset for privatisation on a global scale. The largest companies in the world are involved. but it’s too big for private sector corporations to manage, so the NHS is being broken up into more chunks. These chunks are still huge, on a much larger scale than current privatisations.

We like Americans, but not the global corporations or the US model of health care

Huge companies are involved in privatising of our NHS. It can sound as though we are anti-American. We are not. We get good support for our campaign from Americans. We do though, fear the actions of global corporations who make Richard Branson’s Virgin seem like a corner shop.It is their job to make profits. The NHS cannot afford to fund their profits. Neither do we want to buy their health insurance policies. We want the NHS publicly provided and not for profit.

Now the privatisers want the whole tap. The leaky pipe is not enough.

The model being used in 2018 is based on the 44 areas of the country and they will develop Accountable Care organisations which are city region level privatisations, the The system used in US cities has an organised commercial relationship between health insurers and the companies providing the health care.

Maternity causes problems for private providers

We are a Vanguard area for Maternity. The Maternity Review, authored by conservative politician Baroness Cumberledge and its related Vanguards, are, we believe, intended to build a cost base for maternity after privatisation. Pilots for this costing exercise are going on in the Liverpool Women’s hospital now. The Accountable Care Organisations and Accountable care systems and all the other sweet sounding names for region wide privatisation of the NHS, must know roughly the cost of maternity before they construct their contracts.

Maternity is the largest single reason for people to use hospitals in the US and in the UK. It is very costly in the US and getting insurance is not always possible. A little over one in ten have no insurance, rising to 22% amongst the poor and even higher for non citizens.

So, for this and other reasons, we need to be very wary of any US model for maternity.

This brings us back to the merger of big hospitals in Liverpool. The management of the Liverpool Women’s Hospital and the Clinical Commissioning Group have long favoured a defacto merger with the Royal.We oppose this.

We have opposed this because we believe

1. Maternity funding must be increased. Attempting to save money by such a move is futile, and ignores the real question
2. Women’s health requires focus and research. Women need research and treatment for gender specific health issues. Women die later than men but live in ill-health for much longer. We want our menfolk well too, but women’s bodies and roles require their own focus.
3. A separate hospital allows the focus on women to be protected.
4. We need a place of safety and respect  for women.
5. Money is needed to improve the NHS. Funding a new building at this point would be wasteful and put more money into the pockets of the very rich building companies and their financial backers
6. Staffing shortages are the result of bad or of malicious planning. Multi specialism staffing is needed at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This will need recruitment and training but we refuse to believe it will be better in a few wards in a merged hospital.
7. What we have we hold. As chaos reigns in the NHS, we need to protect the best of what we have,
8. We feel the safety of babies is at risk in the hotspot for traffic that surrounds the Royal Hospital Site.
9. We believe our site is more humane and appropriate than the Royal.

So what do we feel about the proposed Royal and Aintree merger?

We think its part of getting the area ready for the ACO.Its making the health admin of the city simpler for a top down privatisers using an ACO model.

Specialisms have already developed across the city. There is little wrong with that, so long as people can get between the different hospitals. Older people need more complex health care. Expecting them to go to three different hospitals for three different conditions is really tiring and debilitating. Our bodies are not machines to be fixed, We are our bodies we live in them. The different specialisms must coordinate for the benefit of the patients. Tiring out the old, making them trek to different clinics, miles apart, makes them ill. We would want to hear how this can be addressed.

The backdrop of huge cuts;what we have we hold.

Both Hospitals  need more cash just to stand still.

Tristan Cope, medical director  said “We know we have increasing demand on services when funding is flat – and the challenge is meeting that demand without increasing resources.

“In the absence of more spending, the merger is a way to improve care without it costing more money.

The merger though will cost money and some of it will come from the pay packets of NHS workers.

Its fiddling while Rome burns. The NHS funding needs sorting at source and the leaks into private profit must be stopped.

Local Authority social care has been cut to the bone, poverty is making our people ill, mental health services are cut way beyond the bone, bus services are poor and getting worse, pensions are dreadful by European standards, wages are low and prices rising, benefits are inadequate.. In such a situation what we have we hold. Make it safe to make changes before you suggest changes.

 

We want to hear what the workers in the hospitals think.

Getting rid of the internal market between hospitals is good but the myth of saving on backroom staff is so far-fetched it is daft to use it as an excuse for cuts. Out sourced staff is expensive for the workers and the employers.

We need a fully funded NHS. Lets fight for it.

For all our mothers daughters friends and lovers, for the babies and for our elders too,

For the men young and old.