The Campaign for Health Service Democracy aims to bring about a change in the organisation of the Health Service to ensure that everybody employed in the local delivery of health services is accountable to a single body which is democratically elected and accountable to the people it serves. I started the campaign in 1997 after my mother was dismissed with contempt when she needed urgent surgery. While my family's experience has been quite satisfactory since then, others have been worse served. See in particular Continuing abuse in 21st Century (updated 9 October 2007) . The pages on Sharon Wilson were last updated on 17 July 2007.
Compulsory euthanasia must be stopped. When my mother was neglected in 1997 I mentioned on local radio that I suspected the hospital had a policy of euthanasia. That professionals actually try to kill patients without their consent has since been exposed amongst others by Dr Rita Pal, David Glass's family and Bunny Pinnington. A study in January 2006 has shown that two thirds of cases of euthanasia involving doctors are without the patient's consent.
In 2005/06 most NHS bodies were anticipating financial deficits, and many of them resorted to severe service cuts without proper consultation, including closing local hospitals in haste, and one trust in five proposed to default on payments that were legally due. This process has continued. Some of the cuts create idle capacity, where the staffing and premises costs to the service provider are already committed, and the only practical effect is to move the overspend within the local health economy from the commissioning primary care trusts to the provider trusts. The service cuts are real, but will not reduce the forecast consolidated deficit of the national health service to any significant extent. In fact the costs of the turnaround teams and future costs of clearing backlogs of treatment will increase the costs to taxpayers. This is mismanagement on a massive scale. If it were one or a few trusts, it might be argued that a change of chief executive would be the solution. But the problem is too widespread for such a simplistic answer, with 71% of strategic health authorities and 19% of acute trusts investigated by turnaround teams in December 2005 for forecast deficits. Despite Patricia Hewitt's remarking that three-quarters of NHS organisations and local hospitals were in balance or better than that (which the 2005/06 financial outturn showed to be only 67%), there is underfunding nationally, and many of the trusts that currently avoid deficits do so because of inequitable distribution of resources rather than better management. The surplus in 2006/07 results from savage service cuts and denial of treatment. Local NHS bodies have executive responsibility (too much to ministers and not enough to their communities) but no power to raise sufficient funds for their needs and no influence on national policy (apart from the ability to respond to consultations on government initiatives). The Department of Health has failed to estimate competently the costs of its own policies (because civil servants and ministers are too remote to understand how services are delivered), both for political priorities such as creating competition in healthcare (Independent Sector Treatment Centres and generally) and for administrative matters like consultants' and general practitioners' contracts. And yet ministers impose more and more ill-thought-out initiatives. The former secretary of state for health, Patricia Hewitt, acted as though destabilising NHS institutions and disrupting patient care were a means to a virtuous end (denied, but consistent with earlier reports). She resorted to blaming doctors or parts of the country. On the contrary the fundamental financial problems of the NHS are linked to lack of financial resources and physical capacity, and compared with other countries productivity of front line services is high and costs are low. Both power and responsibility need to be at local level. Where matters mainly affecting the local NHS (such as consultants' and general practitioners' contracts) need to be determined nationally, they need to be determined, not by ministers and a central department, but by a national association of the local bodies, which should also be the employer for any national management over the NHS. Ministers should concentrate on health matters interacting with the rest of government or needing essential legislation.
Central co-ordinating bodies like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should extend their role from saying no to particular treatments in an orderly fashion and actively promote beneficial treatments. This should include commissioning clinical trials of off-patent drugs when there is some evidence of beneficial new uses but no incentive for manufacturers to fund trials. See the related petition.
There are an increasing number of petitions on health related matters. These are now listed on the Petitions page
On 13 July 2007 some pages that are infrequently updated have been removed from this page and can be accessed from their index pages.
Other issues that are currently topical include: NHS targets, poor public health, conditional treatment that might involve social exclusion (pushed by Tony Blair when he was Prime Minister as a new "Social Contract" that is much less egalitarian than the one promoted in the 1960s), pressure and compulsion to use MMR vaccine, foundation hospitals and the complex and bureaucratic Choose and Book procedures linked to the patient choice policy. See also the link to Ian Perkin's website covering falsification of statistics at St George's Hospital, Tooting, and anomalies in the NHS's finances, some of which will make the Government's proposals for Foundation Hospitals unworkable - http://www.nhsexpose.co.uk .
The fire at the Buncefield oil depot at Hemel Hempstead on 11 December 2005 is a major source of pollution and highlights the dangers from cement works.
Source material is shown under topics. At the bottom of each page are links upwards, sideways and downwards in the navigation structure. Normally the bottom level of any thread is a page described as "Sources". Temporarily some pages that form a logical part of the web are blank apart from navigation links to other pages. Such pages are generally omitted from the index below.
This website is frequently updated. The latest update is on 09 February 2008.
Events (updated 1 November 2007)
In July 2006 the strategic health authorities were merged into ten new authorities (updated 16 January 2008) . The existing pages listed above will continue to be used. The new authorities' pages will be used for reports that cannot be split into the old areas. London continues to be shown as one area.
Also shown here for completeness reports from areas under devolved administrations:
Sheila
Porter-Williams
Campaign for Health Service Democracy
Green Haven, Halfway Lane
Dunchurch
Rugby, Warwickshire CV22 6RD
sheilaCHSD@porter-williams.freeserve.co.uk