yeah, i think you are right, the activist/leftist movement, such as they are, seem to be focussing completely on international issues, the focus should now turn towards what is happening here, while still keeping an eye on the imperialist adventures abroad.

I work within the NHS and am constantly amazed at the level of understanding on these issues that most NHS workers have. I'm not a domestic, an auxillary nurse or a penpusher, but a doctor on the 'frontline'. I have yet to see any improvement in the acute treatment and management of patients, which of course should have happened with the 'millions' that tone has plugged our way. All I see is increasing levels of red tape, demarkation of jobs and plummeting morale. One of the hospitals that I work in is planning to become one of the first wave of foundation hospitals. The cheif executive of the trust held a meeting of the clinical staff, and I don't know whether it was the fact that I don't need references from these guys (unlike most of my colleagues) or whether its just cos i'm a militant activist but I was the only one to have any questions for the guy. Unable to answer any of my questions in full, he eventually agreed that this plan was a way of getting privatisation in through the back door, would lead to a two teir system and was grossly unfair to the patients. He hasn't held another meeting (at least not one that I've been invited to).

On another tack, PFI hospitals (again, a subjuct that the majority of my colleagues know nothing about) have been shown (in last weeks BMJ) to be more expensive, less efficient and have fewer beds that the hospitals that they are replacing. One such new hospital has visitor parking charges of 30 pounds for 24 hours - just a little bit expensive to stay at the bedside of your dying relative when you only get 50 quid a week in benefits to live on. I have lost count of the doctors that have been unaware of the PFI scheme and its implications even whilst working in a PFI hospital. Whilst the patients feel that they are getting a brand new nhs hospital, they aren't told that in 20 or 30 years time the NHS rent runs out - what happens then - we've got a network of large hospitals around the counrty, fully equipped, but privately run. Another route for privatisation? Whilst working in one of these places (never again) I was told on several occaisions that the building was a private one and that the nhs was renting it. If I was to damage a wall, for example in sticking up a psoter, I personally would have to pay to have it repaired. Once, whilst on call, tending to a sick patient, I failed to hand in my on-call room key until 9am, when I should have finshed my duties at 8am and handed the key in then. As a result I was asked to pay 30 quid to get the locks on the room changed. Just for getting a key back an hour late, because a patients life depended on it, because a PFI hospital has to make money for its shareholders.

My rants about PFI and Foundation Hospitals haven't won me any friends, just emptied rooms rapidly. My colleagues aren't interested in the politics and plans for the health service, just that they need to get a result or book a scan and get some sleep. If the people on the 'inside' don't know whats happening, what hope have we got?

Mavis

I also work in the NHS,and can also clear a room very fast, and I believe the perceptions of most health workers are stultified by the mystification resulting not only from the workings of successive governments that don't give jack shit for the nation's health, but from its governance by the hi-tech, drug cartel directed, high priced poison,cut and burn techniques, which are all the medical establishment promotes or knows.
Perhaps Dr D would be better off talking to some of those lowly domestics and health care assistants.
They tend to be less entrenched in the systems mores and values, hence more receptive to ideas of the service as just another tool to promote the dis-ease of the populace.

Just as with the antiwar argument, so it is with the anti-PFI/privatization argument.

It's very difficult to understand since the argument claims that it is so bad, irrational, and pointless that it is impossible to explain just why the politicians and managers are so keen to do it. I mean, why exactly go to all the effort that they do -- and they put in a *hell* of a lot of effort -- to totally screw things up when at the very least they could leave it alone. Why do it? What's to be gained? Why not be lazy and do nothing? It doesn't make sense.

And who the hell in these hospitals does the deciding? Is it the government appointed chief executive that takes the one lone decision without, say, a vote among the staff? Crazy crazy. One just has to think one's wrong.

Thanks for your comments....

...as it happens, I *DO* talk to all hospital employees about these things - whether domestic, auxillary or whatever. I get the impression (and although please feel free to correct me, don't jump down my throat) that you're one of those people. Segregating hospital employees into non-mingling categories is a little daft - although there are plenty of 'lowly' staff who won't talk to me and plenty of my immeadiate colleagues who won't talk to anyone 'lower' than registrar level. I make coffee for whomever wants it. I talk to whoever's around. I tell patients who I'm admitting how long I've been on call nd how little sleep I've had. I also tell patients to write to their local MP and the sec of state for health (giving them the address as well) when they shout at me for the poor service that they're getting. I explain that I'm doing the best I can with limited resources and that them taking up my time arguing about things I have little hope of changing isn't helping. I get reprimanded by the trusts for handing out MP addresses as this 'isn't the right way to go about things'. I feel shite that the service patients get is nothing like what they've been driven to expect, that the treatment they get is dependent on which hospital they're in and which consultant they've come in under. I get told to shut up, to get on with things without rocking the boat, that whatever I say things wont change. I get made to feel very very small. If thats how my views are taken then what about the views of those 'lowly' people. I'd imagine they see what happens to me and don't even bother to say anything. At least I can walk away at the end of the day and get another job somewhere else since I've got the freedom to do that - but some of the staff who've lived in the area for years haven't got that option.

Sneak preview of tomorrow's SchNEWS. There does need to be more about everyday issues for ordinairy people on the indymedia news wire, although SchNEWS is as guilty as anyone for going on about Iraq.

SHAKY FOUNDATIONS

“If GATS gets the green light Europe can kiss goodbye its public health services” - Susan George, economist.
After bombing Iraq it’s back to bread and butter issues for Neo Labour – flogging off our public services to the lowest bidder. Take Foundation Hospitals which will give private companies a surgical strike on our health service. They will also be able to pull out of nationally agreed pay and conditions for workers. As Allyson Pollock head of health policy at University College London says “Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric: this is about privatisation.”
When Prime Sinister Bliar talks about modernisation read privatisation. Such ‘modernisation’ has already been the fate of 50 NHS hospitals handed over to companies like Jarvis, Tarmac, Siemens and Rentokil thanks to the Private Finance Initiative(PFI) In a study of the first 15 hospitals put under the PFI operating table a third of hospital beds have so far been amputated.
Foundation Hospitals and PFI’s are just what the corporations ordered. These very same corporations are busy pushing for a new round of GATS – the General Agreement on Trade in Services, first signed in 1994 by the World Trade Organisation. GATS aims to remove ‘barriers to trade’ you know silly little things like health and safety rules, environmental laws and planning regulations and open up what’s left of our public services to private corporations – forever.
Once you’ve signed away a certain section of your public services to GATS then there is no going back, because the aim of GATS is ‘progressive liberalisation’ – a way of ensuring that eventually no other model of service delivery other than by the private sector is available. For example despite private companies making a complete pigs ear of our railways, bringing rail maintenance and repair services back under some form of public ownership would breach the UK’s existing GATS commitments. The government would then be taken to a World Trade Organisation tribunal made up of unelected trade lawyers who meet in secret and subsequently told to change the offending law or regulation – of face the massive trade sanctions consequences.

SUBHEAD

Since the government reckons private companies are obviously the right choice for running our hospitals, here’s a little reminder of how corporations have been doing elsewhere. In education, where Local Education Authority’s (LEA) are so under-funded that they cannot afford to put in bids to run their own show, companies like Jarvis are doing a great job. With no previous experience in education, they’ve recently been awarded a £1.9m contract to provide ‘support’ for 700 under-performing secondary schools. Surely that’s not the same Jarvis that’s under investigation for its part in the Potters Bar rail crash? Yep. Or the Jarvis that kept thousands of kids out of school in Liverpool for two weeks and 20 schools in the Huddersfield area closed, because they hadn’t completed works on time? The very same. But surely its not the same Jarvis recently joined by two defectors from rival firm WS Atkins. Atkins recently pulled out of their contract to run Southwark LEA after only two years because “We had bitten off more than we could chew” and because there was no profit to be had, which resulted in the company losing 90% of its value in six months but not before the number of schools in special measures in the borough had risen due to their incompetence? Yes, that Jarvis. Ah, parents can sleep safe at night then.
The school standards minister, David Milibrand, justified Jarvis’ appointment by saying that “Ofsted have said there is a real problem in the quality of support going to the lowest-performing schools.” Is that the same Ofsted that’s farming its school inspections out to companies like Nord Anglia who also run schools? No conflict of interest there then.
Despite an Audit Commission report published in January that found the first PFI schools to be “significantly worse” than other new schools in England and Wales, the government in its wisdom remains convinced that PFI in education is the way forward. Defence and shipping company Vosper Thorneycroft has just won a £100m deal to take over the running of Surrey’s LEA, the first award to be made for a successful LEA. Vosper’s CEO made no attempt to disguise the motivation behind their bid when he boasted “It is £100m over 7 years. If we are able to catch some of the other LEAs we could double or treble our size over that period of time.”
They’d better be careful not to fall victim to the level of greed that almost sunk Amey, the company who took on a third share of the London Underground deal, and also went on to grab contracts for the Ministry of Defence, the Edinburgh school system, and Network Rail - including the Croydon Tram service- which almost went belly up when Amey failed for reasons of mis-management and too-fast growth. No contract-breaking penalties for Amey however, instead they were free to sell their contracts on, for £80m to Spanish construction group Ferrovial, the first foreign firm to get their mitts on Britain’s public services.
Meanwhile, our old mates WS Atkins are on the loose again, as part of the design team for the new Birmingham Northern Relief Road, the 27-mile motorway that seems set to fail in its objectives before work is completed. The road is being built, -despite huge opposition and legal challenges from the local community and environmental groups- by joint venture company CAMBBA (Carillion, McAlpine, Balfour Beatty and Amec) who will also be its operating company after completion. One of the reasons given for building the road was the diversion of heavy polluting trucks off the M6 and out of Birmingham, but the £11 per trip toll that CAMBBA plan to impose on lorry drivers (as opposed to £3 per car) will almost certainly keep those trucks trundling over Spaghetti Junction. And the reasoning behind this can only be guessed at, but Friends of the Earth probably aren’t far from the truth: “…a lorry damages the road infrastructure as much as 100 times more than a car. They’re going to want to attract cars, which give them revenue, but not lorries, which cause damage.”
So, that’s health, education, transport – and so to public housing, what’s left of it. The government is committing £40m into an estate in Manchester as the first of eight ‘social housing’ PFI projects. The Grove Village consortium, led by Nationwide Building Society and house builder Gleeson, will revamp the 1,090 home estate, then sell most of it on to private buyers. Jane Robinson from Unison has said that councils have been left with little option but to use PFI through lack of government funding and that the quest for profit by private companies is “not appropriate in public services, where there’s a range of other responsibilities to be taken into account.” But then we all know that the only responsibility big companies care about is their responsibilities to line the pockets of their shareholders.
* ‘Serving (Up) The Nation: A guide to the UK's commitments under the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services.’ Copies from the World Development Movement 020 7274 7630 or read it at www.wdm.org.uk WDM have also organised a ‘Whose rules rule? Conference 14 - 15 June University of Bradford.
* 31 May Defend Council Housing National Conference Friends Meeting House, Purchase St., Liverpool 0207 987 9989
 http://www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk"

I was in no way criticizing you, just speaking from my own experience. My e-mail's not accessible at the moment or I would have taken that route. I was a nurse manager who did a cock-up or 2 and happily took an S/N role on protected pay. TeeHee - What a great service.
No I appreciate your points fully.
You're good people.
Oh - where did my dreams of Modern fuckin Matron go? Matron!!!

as to why the govenment is putting so much effort into such bad, ineffecient ideas (the PFI & Foundation Trusts)?

Public sector authorites have been told 'Its PFI or Bust' - the government won't provide funding unless they also get private sector cash. The thing it theres no profit in what the NHS needs, so hospital trusts have to design grand schemes with big potential returns to attract the private sector cash.

The debacle surrounding the demolition of two coventry hospitals and the subsequent construction of a smaller one is covered well by a chapter in George Monbiot's 'Captive State'.

The same book also covers the ridiculous cash-grab of the skye bridge amongst other things.

So at the general election what will it be?

Privitisation RED?

OR

Privitisation BLUE?

The choice is yours !!! Viva Democracia !!!