NHS Plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care By Allyson M Pollock With a third Labour government in power, the gradual privatization of the NHS looks set to continue apace. How this has come about - to the point where even the shrinking core of free NHS hospital services is being handed over to private providers at the taxpayers' expense - is still not widely understood, far reaching policy change being hidden behind slogans like 'care in the community', 'diversity' and 'local ownership'. Allyson Pollock demystifies these terms, and in doing so presents a clear and powerful analysis of the transition from a comprehensive and universal service to New Labour's 'mixed economy of health care', in which hospitals with foundation status, loosely supervised by an independent regulator, will be run on largely market principles. http://www.bookdepository.com/NHS-Plc-Allyson-Pollock/9781844675395 The End of the NHS? How the government is privatising health care in England. 01 May 2014 IPR Public Lecture - date: Thursday 01 May Speaker: Professor Allyson Pollock, professor of public health research and policy at Queen Mary, University of London This lecture will show how the government has abolished the NHS; explain how the new structures will operate and what this means for patient access and what needs to be done about it. Biography: Professor Allyson Pollock is professor of public health research and policy at Queen Mary, University of London. She set up and directed the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh from 2005 to 2011, and prior to that she was Head of the Public Health Policy Unit at UCL and Director of Research & Development at UCL Hospitals NHS Trust. She trained in medicine in Scotland and became a consultant in public health medicine in 1991. Her research interests include globalisation; privatisation, marketisation and PFI / PPPs; health services; regulation and trade; pharmaceuticals and clinical trials; and childhood injuries. Why A&E; departments are fighting for their life The marketisation of the NHS pits hospital against hospital, and specialism against specialism. The whole service is suffering, not just A&E; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/14/emergency-departments-fighting-for-life-nhs-marketisation A&E; is the canary in the mine; it tells the story of what is going on elsewhere in the service. Cuts, competition and the fight for survival are at the heart of the story. Over the past 20 years many hospitals and A&E; departments have been closed, usually as part of private finance initiative projects: what drove the closures was the high price of PFI, not changing patient needs. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/14/emergency-departments-fighting-for-life-nhs-marketisation Hospital beds have been lost at a rapid pace too, not because there isn't a need for them, but because the government is paving the way to divert patients to the private sector in the future, or removing NHS services to allow foundation trusts to generate income from private patients. Over two and half decades successive governments have closed over 50% of NHS beds. In 2013/14 there were 135,000 NHS beds compared with 297,000 in 1987/88. England now has one of the lowest number of beds in Europe and the highest bed occupancy -- over 100% in some specialities -- which means medical patients are being displaced on to surgical wards, leading to cancelled elective surgery and increased waiting times. And without beds, pressure builds in A&E.; No one is monitoring or measuring this: community health councils, once the voice of local people, have long since been abolished, and there is no census of emergency departments. At the same time, the government is closing services in primary care and local authorities are axing services in social care. GP out-of-hours services are no longer functioning as they should and neither are social services and community support. More pressure builds. The Labour government set up walk-in centres and minor injury units as an alternative to GP out-of-hours services. But now these are also being closed; of the 230 opened under Labour, 53 have shut down in the past three years.

• published: 01 May 2014
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