SAVE OUR NHS
The promise to keep Battledown children's ward open as a 24 hour inpatient is to be broken. St. Paul's maternity wing is to close. The Delancey is to close and its rehabilitative care moved to other sites or into the community. Mental Health inpatient services are to be rationalised. A range of other hospital services currently provided in both Cheltenham and Gloucester will be provided in one place only.
The government has got its sums wrong. They have put extra cash into the NHS but they have also imposed initiative after initiative after initiative without giving local NHS managers the funds to pay for them. The new GP contract alone has cost the NHS £300 million more than planned. And they're making matters worse by letting the overspends accumulate over several years but asking local managers to clear them in one year.
The three local Primary Care Trusts who pay for local hospitals, ambulances and mental health services have been asked to save a staggering £29 million in one year. But it gets worse. Changes to funding rules mean that hospital managers themselves will need to save a further £10 million.
Yes. There is a nationwide crisis in the NHS but funding per head in Cheltenham & Tewkesbury is due to be £1223 by 2007 compared to more than £1500 in other parts of the country. Why? Because we're seen as wealthier and healthier. But of course we have our older population and our less well off and less healthy too and we keep on getting ill despite the government's figures.
No. Gordon Brown offered nothing to local NHS trusts in crisis. But those which have balanced the books - like Cheltenham & Tewkesbury Primary Care Trust - are being asked to bail out neighbouring trusts that are in even worse straits. So we pay twice.
Ministers are letting local NHS managers carry the can. They have been asked to actually make the cuts. Some of their specific decisions are wrong - for instance Battledown ward has already been downgraded and must not be cut again. 27,000 petition signatories were promised by all the local trusts last year that the ward would stay open as an inpatient ward and it must. But the real blame lies with government. Martin has already met with the Secretary of State to protest and has raised the issue in Parliament. But we need more voices, more signatures, more public protest at this devastating attack on our local NHS.
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Watch the local press for details of marches and protests and join us if you can.
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Print out and sign the petition and get your friends and family and workmates to sign too and send it to Martin at 16 Hewlett Road, Cheltenham GL52 6AA.
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Write in protest to The Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health, Department of Health, Richmond House, 79 Whitehall, London SW1A 2NS.
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