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Foundation trusts have undermined our NHS
CRITICISM raged when foundation trust hospitals were introduced by Tony Blair several years ago.
Blair argued it would give hospitals greater accountability. Critics said foundation trusts would undermine the founding principles of the National Health Service.
By achieving independence from central government control, hospitals were invited to compete for patients in a new NHS marketplace – creating a two-tier healthcare system that critics warned would lead to smaller hospitals falling by the wayside and increased borrowing from the private sector.
And lo it came to pass.
University College London Hospital, since it was opened by the Queen in 2005 as one of the country’s flagship foundation trusts, has gone from strength to strength leaving its near neighbours to fall by the wayside.
The proposals at the Royal Free and the Whittington show how desperate things have become for the hospitals that did not make the grade. If a merger is approved, as expected, 450,000 fewer patients in Camden, Haringey and Islington – nearly half the combined number of patient population of the two hospitals – will be treated there each year.
The Royal Free bravely states that patient care will not be compromised, but redundancies and cuts will surely follow. As for the patients who would normally be sent to the Royal Free or the Whittington, where will they go?
Ironically, at a time when the Obama government is slowly dragging parts of the US privately run health system into some kind of public health service, movement is in the opposite direction here.
• AN amazing bucolic scene will soon meet the eye of passers-by in busy Goodge Street, Fitzrovia – row after row of allotments actively being tendered by green-fingered residents.
They will turn a site, abandoned by developers, into the equivalent of farmland, in the very midst of the capital.
Something good it seems has come out of the recession. The site, where once stood the Middlesex Hospital, was earmarked by developers for 273 luxury flats. But then came the property crash followed by a top-gear campaign for allotments by local residents, and finally capitulation by the developers, Stanhope Plc.
If the property slump had occurred years ago, the magnificent Middlesex Hospital wouldn’t have been torn down.
But the recession came too late to save the hospital whose destruction was regarded by locals as an act of vandalism.
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