Demonstrations continue against Tory ‘downskilling’ of the NHS to increase profits

Members of the Merseyside Pensioners Association (MPA) joined health workers on Tuesday to protest outside a meeting of the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care (ICS) board meeting against plans to cut NHS costs by reducing skill levels in the health service in a copy of unequal and heavily-privatised US healthcare.

The protest and meeting were held at the Floral Pavilion in Wirral’s New Brighton. The MPA joined a large crowd of Wirral Clinical Support workers and Unison members who have been demanding better pay. MPA members were protesting against the downskilling of medical professionals – a move under the so-called NHS Workforce Plan to replace doctors, midwives, nurses, anaesthetists and other highly-qualified workers with cheaper, less qualified staff to pad NHS staff numbers and reduce wage cost, allowing private health companies to provide services at greater profit.

One MPA campaigner told Skwawkbox:

Forcing or encouraging staff to work beyond their competencies is dangerous for patients and staff. NHS campaigners have been highlighting downskilling, professional deregulation, working beyond competencies and similar government moves for several years. It is not accidental, nor is it a response to “shortages of doctors”, “ageing population “, “bed blocking” or “underfunding” – these terms are all propaganda put out to justify the deliberate systematic destruction and withdrawal of the NHS to benefit big business & increase profit.

Some of us went into the meeting, raised questions about the difficulty and hostile processes involved in booking a GP appointment, the difficulty getting to see an actual GP rather than a Physician Associate [a position carrying out medical duties with only two years’ basic training] or other staff member and the lack of continuity that means we rarely see the same person twice.

We told the Board that we want to see fully-qualified medical professionals, that the right people with the right skills for the right job are fully-qualified doctors, anaesthetists etc. The Assistant CEO told us they have bought a new ‘cloud telephony’ service but that there won’t be any increase in GPs or Practitioners in GP surgeries, therefore we assume no increase in appointments either!

So the response appears to be they’ll just move the deckchairs on the Titanic around in a different manner! A longwinded way of saying they had wasted money on a new phone service presumably so you can more easily be told there are no GP appointments. At the ICS Annual General Meeting/ICB meeting last year an actual GP pointed out that without more GPs/appointments, changing the telephone system wasn’t going to help.

A further campaign meeting will take place on Friday 23 Feb at Liverpool’s socialist bar, the Casa:

The government’s use of ‘associates’ instead of fully-qualified medics has already been linked by coroners to at least two avoidable deaths.

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