Dear Editor,

Fellow Mendip District Councillor Sam Phripp and I recently met the Matron of our Frome Community Hospital to discuss the services the hospital provides (see earlier story and Sam Phripp’s). While I am querying whether the MIU can always prescribe for minor illnesses out of hours, the hospital has an impressively wide range of services, and is working well at coordinating with other providers, including local doctors. Frome’s local hospital is also well funded from both the NHS and the amazing efforts of the ‘Friends’.  Our NHS is so special, we should all want to keep it that way.  

However, I was disappointed to see the Heath & Social Care Bill voted through the House of Commons, despite many backbench Lib Dems opposing the bill. Many important changes have been made since the Lib Dems rejected the Bill at Spring Conference, but the Royal Colleges of Nurses and GPs, the BMA and others, still warn of a massive increase in costs due to a new bureaucracy, of a fragmentation of care as a result of increased competition, and about the abolition of the Government’s duty to provide a health service, the threats of EU competition law, and the potential for hospitals to fill up with private patients. 

(N.B. Liberal Democrats led the calls for changes to the original Bill after raising serious concerns at the party’s Spring Conference in March 2011.  Nick Clegg and others have since worked hard in Government to make sure many concerns have been addressed, but significant concerns remain…)

A recent study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found the NHS to be the 2^nd most cost-effective health service, and was most effective in saving lives, in the developed world, whereas the USA’s current health system, with probably the most competition, is one of the least efficient. But the Conservatives in Government insist the NHS has to have more competition to be more efficient!

 But there is hope – as the bill moves to the Lords, Lib Dem Baroness Shirley Williams says ‘the battle is far from over’. I therefore encourage everyone to join the campaigns by the Social Liberal Forum, 38 Degrees, health bodies and unions, to persuade the House of Lords to remove the Bill’s threats to our health service, including the ‘Adopt a Peer’ initiative.  Links to these campaigns can be found above.