NHS 10-year plan: Recipe for further attacks on services and privatisation in UK
By
Ajanta Silva
7 February 2019
Theresa May’s Conservative government recently set out a 10-year plan for the National Health Service (NHS).
As if everyone was oblivious to the last nine years of austerity, including huge cuts to the NHS budget and privatization of health services, May claimed the Tories would be the saviours of the NHS over the next decade with the launch of the Long Term Plan (LTP).
The 10-year Plan promises to save “almost half a million more lives with practical action on major killer conditions”; “investment in world class, cutting edge treatments including genomic tests for every child with cancer”; “early detection and a renewed focus on prevention in stopping an estimated 85,000 premature deaths each year”; “help prevent 150,000 heart attacks, strokes and dementia cases”; “investment in primary, community and mental health care”; to “provide digital GP consultations for all those who want them” over the next decade.
May wrote in the Mail on Sunday: “The launch of the NHS Long Term Plan marks an historic step to secure its future and offers a vision for the service for the next ten years, with a focus on ensuring that every pound is spent in a way that will most benefit patients. This will help relieve pressure on the NHS while providing the basis to transform care with world-class treatments.”
These warm words cannot conceal the fact that the LTP is nothing but a preface to the further erosion of health services and lays the ground work for wholesale privatization.
Since 2010, the NHS has suffered the lowest ever funding increase in its entire history, propelling NHS trusts into dealing with huge deficits. Half of NHS trusts ended last…