There are two main NHS news items today – Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams criticises the ConDem coalition policies and actions generally (which of course includes the NHS) and the security group Lulz Security warns of lax NHS computer security.

Welsh man of God Rowan Williams is currently guest editor of the New Statesman magazine. He writes an editorial highly critical of the Con-Dem coalition government

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/09/david-cameron-rowan-williams-criticism

“With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted.

“At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context.”

He criticised the government for continuing to blame the country’s difficulties entirely on the deficit it inherited from Labour and said there was “bafflement and indignation” over coalition plans to reform the health service and education.

Cameron responds by rejecting the criticisms.

I’m with the whiskered Welshman on this one. Clearly nobody voted for huge top-down reorganisation of the NHS and huge NHS cuts – instead they voted for exactly the opposite. Likewise nobody voted for abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance and 300% increases in tuition fees.

Lutz Security have merely warned the NHS that it stumbled across some admin passwords. I have some suspicions on what is meant by “we hope that little girls feasts on the bones of many giving souls”. Think about it. (I don’t think that the little girls bit is intended literally.)

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

New Statesman – Leader: The government needs to know how afraid people are

…With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context. Not many people want government by plebiscite, certainly. But, for example, the comprehensive reworking of the Education Act 1944 that is now going forward might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates. The anxiety and anger have to do with the feeling that not enough has been exposed to proper public argument.

I don’t think that the government’s commitment to localism and devolved power is simply a cynical walking-away from the problem. But I do think that there is confusion about the means that have to be willed in order to achieve the end. If civil society organisations are going to have to pick up
responsibilities shed by government, the crucial questions are these. First, what services must have cast-iron guarantees of nationwide standards, parity and continuity? (Look at what is happening to youth services, surely a strategic priority.) Second, how, therefore, does national government underwrite these strategic “absolutes” so as to make sure that, even in a straitened financial climate, there is a continuing investment in the long term, a continuing response to what most would see as root issues: child poverty, poor literacy, the deficit in access to educational excellence, sustainable infrastructure in poorer communities (rural as well as urban), and so on? What is too important to be left to even the most resourceful localism?

Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present. It isn’t enough to respond with what sounds like a mixture of, “This is the last government’s legacy,” and, “We’d like to do more, but just wait until the economy recovers a bit.” To acknowledge the reality of fear is not necessarily to collude with it. But not to recognise how pervasive it is risks making it worse. Equally, the task of opposition is not to collude in it, either, but to define some achievable alternatives. And, for that to happen, we need sharp-edged statements of where the disagreements lie.
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David Cameron hits back at Rowan Williams over coalition criticism | Politics | The Guardian

David Cameron has rejected the archbishop of Canterbury’s claim that the coalition government is forcing through “radical policies for which no one voted”. The prime minister said Rowan Williams was free to express his concerns, but he “profoundly disagreed” with many of his comments.

Conservative and Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers joined backbenchers in registering surprise at the sweep and the specifics of the archbishop’s criticisms.

Speaking at a press conference on a visit to Northern Ireland, Cameron said: “I think the archbishop of Canterbury is entirely free to express political views. I have never been one to say that the Church should fight shy of making political interventions.

“But what I would say is that I profoundly disagree with many of the views that he has expressed, particularly on issues like debt and welfare and education.”

BBC News – Hackers warn NHS over security

A notorious hacker group has warned the NHS that its computer networks are vulnerable to cyber attack.

Lulz Security, which claims to have been behind a recent hack on Sony, sent an email to NHS administrators revealing it had found a way to breach the service’s network.

But the Department of Health was quick to deny that any patient information was at risk.

The hackers said they did not intend to steal any data.

Styling themselves as “pirate ninjas”, LulzSec posted on Twitter the e-mail it sent to the NHS.
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Lulz warns NHS of sick security • The Register

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Lulz published an email sent to the NHS with the relevant passwords blacked out.

It said:

We’re a somewhat known band of pirate-ninjas that go by LulzSec.

Some time ago, we were traversing the Internets for signs of enemy fleets.

While you aren’t considered an enemy – your work is of course brilliant – we did stumble upon several of your admin passwords, which are as follows….

We mean you no harm and only want to help you fix your tech issues. Also, we hope that little girls feasts on the bones of many giving souls. All the best.

Lulz Security
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Shameless deception in support of wealthy friends / Features / Home – Morning Star

Cameron’s five “pledges” on the NHS include a pledge for more privatisation. He promised not to “sell off the NHS.” But he never planned to sell the NHS. Instead he will force the NHS to buy health services from the people who fund his party.

And when Cameron says “we will ensure competition benefits patients” he actually means he will ensure that fixed markets benefit his business chums. There won’t be a “sell-off,” there will be a money transfusion with cash pumped out of NHS hospitals and into the bank balances of Tory supporters. They get healthy profits. NHS hospitals are left undernourished and weak.

The privatisers are Cameron’s backers. Circle Health, which is about to run the first fully privatised NHS hospital, is owned by investors who have given the Tories a staggering £862,000.

The firm was cleared to take over Hinchingbrooke NHS Hospital near Cambridge this October. It is often described as a “social enterprise” – a John Lewis-style partnership. The impression this gives is that it is some kind of workers’ co-operative committed to the greater good. But it turns out that the “social enterprise” is just a front for big money.

Circle Health is 49 per cent owned by employees and 51 per cent owned by greedy millionaires. One firm, Odey Asset Management, owns 21 per cent of Circle Health. A company called Lansdowne Holdings owns a further 18 per cent.

These are hedge firms which like making multimillion-pound bets on the stock market. But Cameron has stacked the odds in their favour by promising that the NHS must use more private companies.
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Waiting times for diagnostic tests are hugely increased under the ConDem government despite Cameron’s pledges yesterday, British Mediacal Association’s GPs conference object to the Con-Dem’s plans to destroy the NHS and many GPs are driven to early retirement by theCon-Dems.

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

NHS waiting times for diagnostic tests increase despite Cameron’s pledge | Society | The Guardian

The number of patients waiting more than six weeks for diagnostic tests on the NHS has tripled within 12 months, according to figures released a day after David Cameron pledged not to lose control of NHS waiting times.

More than 14,000 patients who had diagnostic procedures including MRI scans and cardiac tests in April 2011 had waited more than six weeks, up from 4,129 in the same month a year ago – an increase of 240% in a year.

The number of patients with waits of more than three months also rocketed, with 1,409 people in this category against just 193 the previous April.

On Tuesday Cameron stressed that the abolition of central monitoring of NHS treatment and A&E waiting times would not lead to a loss of focus in these areas.
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GPs not fooled by David Cameron’s pledges – doctors vote overwhelmingly to prevent destruction of NHS

GPs have voted overwhelmingly to continue to oppose the Health and Social Care bill.

The GPs, including members of the Medical Practitioners Union (part of Unite) were among 250 GPs present at the British Medical Association’s annual GP conference in London today (Thursday).

The vote reflects that doctors are also not convinced that the prime minister’s pledges will safeguard the service.

Ron Singer of the Medical Practitioners Union said: “GPs were not fooled by the warm words of the prime minister. Today GPs have signalled to the government that their health bill is not acceptable in any aspect. The general consensus is that this bill must go.

“It poses the greatest threat to the NHS since its inception. Far from improving the nation’s health, such is the scale of the change the government is seeking to impose, they will compromise the health of the nation and endanger patients.

“Whatever the prime minister may promise, the medical experts are telling him this bill will fragment the NHS. Our parliamentarians must now listen.”
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Reforms ‘cutting legs off NHS’, says Laurence Buckman | Healthcare Network | Guardian Professional

The health and social care bill is not even law yet and the current structures of the NHS are “already collapsing all over the place”, Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) GPs committee, has said.

In a speech to the annual GPs’ conference of local medical committees on 9 June, he told delegates that the NHS “isn’t just being cut to the bone, the whole limbs are being amputated” as a result of health secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans to reorganise the health service.

“If you cut the legs off the NHS, what happens? It falls over,” he said. He went on to state that the BMA “does not support the unfettered extension of private involvement in the NHS”.
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Health News – NHS reforms ‘a major factor in GP retirement’

The majority of GPs who plan to retire in the next two years say the NHS reforms have played a major role in their decision to leave.

That is the preliminary finding of a major new survey by the British Medical Association (BMA), which has analysed the first 10,000 responses to its poll ahead of an annual GP conference.

Age was the most common reason given for imminent retirement, with 71 per cent of GPs citing this.

However, NHS reform came a close second, with 56 per cent of respondents claiming that this had played a significant part in their decision-making.

The findings suggest that as many as 3,700 GPs across the UK could soon retire as a result of NHS reforms.

Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GPs committee, said: ‘These results show that GPs have significant concerns about the government’s NHS reform plans as they stand.

‘From talking to GPs we know that they see potential in the principle of clinically-led commissioning, but there need to be major changes made to the bill if the government is to reassure GPs.’
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NHS news is dominated by responses to Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Five pledges, hold me to them’ speech yesterday. Many responses attack the credibility of Cameron’s pledges.

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

If the NHS budget is being protected, why are hospitals facing huge cuts? | Society | The Guardian

Special report: The government promised real terms increases in the NHS budget, but Sarah Boseley finds on the ground the reality is services are being cut and healthcare rationed

In the little village of Mortimer, near Reading, Berkshire, Bill Walters sits most of the day in the conservatory he built before his hip gave out. He can get up the stairs with crutches, but the pain, he says, half-way up and breathing heavily with the effort, is “excruciating”. Doctors agree he needs a hip replacement. On 9 December he was told the waiting time was 18 weeks. He now has a “pencilled-in” date in July, when he will have been waiting for 31 weeks.

A little over a year ago, David Cameron stood at a lectern in the first televised leaders debate of a British general election and declared his passionate devotion to the NHS following the illness and death of his son, Ivan. “What it did for my family and my son I will never forget,” he said. His party would make an exception of the NHS, he promised, sparing the axe and increasing spending in real terms so that “we improve it, we expand it, we develop it”.

Bill Walters could be forgiven for wondering how Cameron’s pledge squares with his present pain. Waiting lists like the one he is on are growing. The Patients Association, hearing hundreds of stories from people complaining of delayed and cancelled operations, put in freedom of information requests to every acute NHS Trust in England in January, asking about nine common surgical procedures including hip and knee replacements. Among the 62 Trusts that replied, it concluded, 10,757 patients had not received an operation because they were unfortunate enough to need it in 2010 instead of 2009.
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New Statesman – Cameron’s NHS spending pledge is worthless

The PM claims that spending will rise but the figures show that it will be frozen or even cut.

One of David Cameron’s “five guarantees” on the NHS is that spending on the health service will rise “in real terms” over the course of this Parliament. In his speech on the NHS today, the PM boasted that there would be “£11.5 billion more in cash for the NHS in 2015 than in 2010”. He added: “We are not cutting the NHS. In fact, we are spending more on it.”

Cameron is referring to the fact that spending on the NHS, which currently stands at £102.9 bn, will rise to £114.4bn by 2014-15, a cash increase of £11.5bn. But what he ignores is that all of this increase will be swallowed up by inflation. The purchasing power of the NHS will be progressively reduced as the price of drugs and equipment continues to rise.

Once we take inflation into account, health spending will be frozen or even cut. As Professor John Appleby, chief economist at the King’s Fund, writes in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal, “by 2014-15 the amount of money the NHS has to spend in real terms, its purchasing power, will have gone down by 0.9%.” Thus, not only will Cameron fail to meet his flagship pledge to increase spending on the NHS “in real terms”, he will fail to even protect it from the cuts.

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More insidious but still deadly / Comment / Home – Morning Star

David Cameron’s decision to give personal guarantees about the future of the NHS and to declare himself “personally accountable” to deliver those guarantees is astounding.

It shows that the Prime Minister understands that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has lost the plot and with it any appreciable support in the health service.

No-one should have any illusion about Cameron’s attitude to the NHS and other public services.

He knew exactly what was in Lansley’s proposals.

He and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg signed them last year.

Both men have been ducking and diving in recent months as one section of health carers after another has lined up to denounce what they see clearly as the private sector taking over our health service.

Cameron makes a lot of noise about not privatising the NHS, but he is being disingenuous.

No-one imagines that such a huge enterprise as the NHS would be put up as a job lot to be bid for by privateers or revamped as “some American-style private system,” as he puts it.

The Con-Dem coalition plan is more insidious but just as deadly.

The government intends to open every aspect of health care to the private sector, allowing it to play the role of a parasitic creeper that envelops a healthy tree and deprives it of life.
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Cameron’s 5 NHS lies / Britain / Home – Morning Star

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The lies

‘We will not endanger universal coverage — we will make sure it remains a National Health Service.’
‘We will not break up or hinder efficient and integrated care — we will improve it.’
‘We will not lose control of waiting times — we will
ensure they are kept low.’
‘We will not cut spending on the NHS — we will increase it.’
‘And if you’re worried that we are going to sell-off the NHS and create some American-style private system — we will not. We will ensure ­competition benefits
patients.’

Lister replies

£20 billion ‘efficiency savings’ will leave patients a grim choice of going private or going without
The Bill threatens to fragment many other services by offering bits of them up to competitive tender by ‘any willing provider’ and putting hospitals into competition.
But waiting times are already rising after Mr Lansley scrapped national targets.
This is wilful deception. From this year a combination of inflation and other cost pressures on the NHS mean that real spending is already going down in real terms, and will at best remain frozen over two years.
Not even the most fanatical private provider wants to buy up the whole NHS, or could afford to do so. Cameron knows that even if he did want a US-style system here, he could never sell it to the voters.

Critics unconvinced by Cameron pledges on the NHS | Ekklesia

Prime Minister David Cameron’s promise to “protect” the National Health Service will be meaningless if his government remains determined to force through the most significant and controversial rewriting of the NHS’ mission in its 60 year history, say health workers.

Unite, now the country’s largest trade union, says that widespread distrust of the government’s plans to dismantle the NHS have forced the prime minister into the astonishing position of making yet another declaration of commitment to the NHS – in the face of doubts brought about by his own policies, and by lack of confidence in Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

Unite says Mr Cameron’s emollient words on 7 June 2011 will be met with “justified voter anger” if, as feared, the pause on the Health and Social Care bill results in little or no change to the competition-first proposals which have attracted an astonishing degree of criticism from health professionals.

The union adds that promises to keep waiting lists “low” insult the thousands of people now facing an 18-week or more wait since the government scrapped waiting time commitments as one of its first acts in office.
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Cuts bite despite PM’s NHS vow (From The Northern Echo)

ON the day Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to increase spending on the NHS, a North-East hospital trust announced an emergency package of spending cuts totalling £22m.

Simon Pleydell, chief executive of South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust, also revealed yesterday that, despite Government promises to ring-fence NHS spending, his trust had started this financial year £6m worse off than the previous year.

Mr Pleydell, who runs the 1,160-bed James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough, and the 180-bed Friarage Hospital in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, said the trust was having to slam the brakes on spending in order to hit Government efficiency targets.

Yesterday, Mr Cameron announced he was making “real changes” to controversial plans for NHS reforms in England and issued five guarantees, including a promise that NHS spending would be increased every year.
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BBC News – Social care industry on the ‘brink of collapse’

The UK’s care industry is on the “brink of collapse”, according to a report by the public-sector union Unison.

There have been growing concerns about the UK’s biggest care-home provider, Southern Cross.

Unison said other companies in the sector also had financial difficulties, and that if they went under, taxpayers would have to pick up the bill.

The Department of Health denied that financial issues had undermined the care system.

Southern Cross, which has 31,000 residents, has said it will have to reduce the amount of rent it pays to its landlords for the next four months.

The Unison report said the next biggest provider, Four Seasons, was also in trouble and the two providers were “clinging on by their fingernails”.

But Four Seasons chief executive Dr Pete Calveley said the company was in “a robust financial position and is certainly not in any difficulties”.

The union said the care industry could be highly profitable for private-equity investors and was worth about £4bn a year – but the investment was “high risk”, with many owners trying to “re-sell at the highest price in the shortest time”.

“Just as some banks were too big to fail so some public service contracts are too big, or too important, to fail,” it added.

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said: “We have already seen the huge impact of the Southern Cross collapse, but the care crisis is far from over.

“Private equity and other private sector operators are hovering over the NHS, eager to make a quick profit – at the long term cost of care quality and continuity of service.

“Taxpayers will have to pay the price again, as they will be forced to pick up the bill for collapsing companies. We need to halt the privatisation of any more public services, before more people are made to suffer in the name of profits.”

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