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1. North Bristol NHS Trust's Children’s Community Health Partnership under threat
North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) have announced that they are not bidding for the contract to continue providing their current Children’s Community Health Partnership (CCHP) services in Bristol and South Gloucestershire - independent newspaper The Bristol Cable reported last week. [read the full report into the Bristol plans, and a more recent update "Award-winning Bristol novelist backs NHS children’s health services campaign"]
This could mean the privatisation of CCHP, which provides services like community paediatrics and school nursing in Bristol and South Gloucestershire - all community child health and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).
A campaign by health workers and supporters, including Bristol group Protect Our NHS - who have background information on the services on their site: "Can we seriously trust Virgin Care will the ill health of our most vulnerable children? Bristol's CCG thinks we can"
The BBC Points West article "Virgin Care in running for £28m Bristol NHS contract", as well as noting the interest of Richard Branson's company, mentions that a 38 degrees petition has 4,000 signatures.
Branson's Virgin Care recently won a £280 million contract to run NHS healthcare in East Staffordshire. Virgin already operates 30 primary care services across England including GP practices, GP out of hours services, walk-in centres, urgent care centres and minor injury units. Last year the Care Quality Commission (CQC) found that an Urgent Care Clinic run by Virgin in Croydon was "in breach of four basic standards of care" (see Guardian article: "NHS watchdog says Virgin Care-run clinic put patients at risk").
A report by Unite the Union has shown how Virgin Care avoids tax by using 13 intermediate holding companies to distance the firm’s healthcare division from its parent company.
For more information, check out the Protect CCHP facebook page and a twitter account for the campaign set up to defend children's community and mental health services in Bristol & South Gloucestershire from privatisation.
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2. Protest in Bristol next Wednesday 26th August, 12.30-1.30pm
There is a protest about the plans detailed above next Wednesday lunchtime 12.30-1.30pm - meeting at the Bearpit in Bristol (St James Barton roundabout) and walking a short distance to Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group offices in South Plaza.
Is anyone interested in going from Stroud? Email us via contact@stroudagainstcuts.co.uk or call 07734 058789.
There is also a petition from the Protect CCHP campaign - addressed to Bristol CCG, Bristol City Council, South Gloucestershire CCG, South Gloucestershire Council, North Somerset CCG, North Somerset Council and NHS England, calling for the above organisations to "ensure that all the services within the Children's Community Health Partnership (CCHP) including the Inpatient Adolescent Mental Health Service, continue to be provided together and within the NHS."
The petition has been signed by over 5,000 people - help get it to 10,000!
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3. The Future of the NHS...?
Dr Clive Peedell, co-leader of the National Health Action Party, has hit out at NHS England’s CEO for failing to negotiate sufficient funding from Jeremy Hunt ahead of the general election, suggesting the NHS is being set up to fail. Read his piece: "Simon Stevens' disastrous funding deal is failing the NHS"
Meanwhile, Shibley Rahman explores the enthusiasm for smartphone-based technology in healthcare:
"This month Jeremy Hunt MP gave what he told us was his “most important speech as health secretary". "The future is here", Hunt told us in his speech. "40,000 health apps now on iTunes, these innovations are coming sooner than most people realise."
But how useful are these apps? How safe are they? Will they be effectively regulated? Who will get their hands on the data they generate? Who will be providing them? [...] Are apps preferable to healthcare professionals because they provide "better care" - or because they are easier to commodify and outsource?
Will Cameron and Hunt's promises of "24/7 NHS access" turn out to mean, not 24/7 access face-to-face with a trained and regulated healthcare professional, but 24/7 access to an app?"
Read the full article: "A 24/7, transparent NHS – or the rise of the planet of the apps?".
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4. Protecting the vulnerable?
Frances Ryan, writing in The Guardian, asks "Conservatives promised to protect the ‘most vulnerable’. How’s that going?"
The article notes that research by the Guardian has shown that "one in six of all jobseekers have their [unemployment benefit] payments stopped each year", and that from 2017, many people judged by the government’s own assessment to be unable to work will be put on the same rate as a jobseeker. "If someone with severe mental health problems, a person too ill or disabled to work, or a single parent looking after their toddler on a low income are not the “vulnerable” citizens the government wants to protect, it raises the question: who exactly is?", Ryan asks, before concluding: " In fact there is no such thing as the “most vulnerable”. There are simply people who are more vulnerable to dire political choices."
Meanwhile, the Department of Work and Pensions has admitted making up quotes by 'benefit claimants' saying sanctions helped them!
Seeking to raise-awareness of the effects of government policies on psychological wellbeing, a group of psychologists are marching from the British Psychological Society (BPS) offices in Leicester to its headquarters in the capital. The Walk the Talk campaign will take in visits to food banks, supported housing, homelessness services and mental health centres, recording testimonies from people whose psychological wellbeing has been jeopardised by the benefits system and Work Programme, as Dawn Foster reports in a powerful article in the Guardian: "The psychologists walking 100 miles to fight austerity’s impact on mental health".
“People’s psychological experience is exacerbated by their social situation. Some people are really struggling to feed their families, or worrying about whether they can pay their heating bills over the winter. Their debts are mounting up and they’re not able to find a way out,” organiser Stephen Weatherhead, a 37-year-old clinical psychologist working in Lancaster says. “It feels a bit crass trying to work with someone on their depression or anxiety, when that depression or anxiety is well-founded because they’re at risk of losing their home, or not being able to feed their kids.”
The group wants to encourage people with experience of mental health problems and multiple inequalities to speak out, on the event via the #walkthetalk2015 hashtag. The Walk The Talk group also have an account for updates on Twitter. There are more details at the website.
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