GOOD THINGS TO CAMPAIGN ON
- spiralling waiting lists, particularly personal stories of pain
- reduced patient safety, examples of increased errors for instance with
drugs
- reduced service, such as withdrawal of certain treatments, community
support or real reductions in services (transferring specialisms from
district to regional centres is not a good example here, as it might be an
improvement in care and patient safety results)
- poor care, such as increased waiting times in A&E, difficulty in getting
GP, understaffing of wards to patient detriment
- poor management and unfair treatment of staff
- naked examples of profiteering and greed, such as privatising services to
corporations with millionaire bosses (but not a blanket ban on transfer of
some services to independent providers where TUPE is respected and new
contracts are decent, and there is a prospect of innovative care
- waste, such as reorganisations or privatisations for their own sake
- incoherence and failure, e.g. London reorganisation and cancer fund
- political interference in clinical judgements - the disastrous cancer fund
for example
BAD THINGS TO CAMPAIGN ON
- input measures such as budget numbers, staff numbers, bed numbers which
aren't in themselves a guarantor of better healthcare
- structures and organisational boundaries
- tilting at windmills such as "privatisation" when it is really
reconfiguration or services better done by others (such as some successful
services around chronic care in the community from third sector)
- propping up crap NHS offerings - I am thinking incontinence services in my
own area which should be handed to a competent contractor
- let's not get caught opposing democratic or mutual solutions for the NHS
which was a notable failure of our thirteen years. If we can build policy
early, then it should be around principles which offer local democratic
strategic planning, scrutiny, and accountability
