NHS staff vow to combat service sell-off

Primary care trust commissioner Amanda Duggan of Huddersfield health branch hit out against the Health and Social Care Act and the privatisation it will cause. She warned that by dividing the NHS, they were dividing the unions.

"Next year I don't know whether I'm going to have a job as PCTs are to be divided.

"But, in order to secure multi-million-pound contracts for patient services, private companies are not going to deliver them to the standards promised.

"We need to stop them now before all the hard work of our predecessors is wasted."

Ms Duggan spoke at the final day of Unison's health conference, calling for the development of an organising strategy to meet the challenges of any qualified provider policy and members affected by it.

Delegates warned that the policy would create massive expansion of private provision in health care, fragment the NHS, reduce terms and conditions of staff and drive down quality of care.

Conference also heard the damaging effects on patients and NHS staff of privatisation of NHS shared services in England and called on the service group executive to keep all NHS services in-house.

NHS 24 spokesman Kenny Woods called for a campaign for greater transparency around the costs of current and future outsourcing.

He said: "We are dealing with a government obsessed with the privatisation of the health service.

"The only ones that benefit from outsourcing are the private companies that stand to profit from them. Privatisation has failed in terms of efficiency."

Yorkshire health branch's Melanie Jones flagged the need to investigate ways of lodging legal trade disputes at every stage of the privatisation process.

"Pay and conditions will suffer from privatisation," she said.

"When we are prepared to fight outsourcing Unison must be able to support whenever possible legal trades disputes. We need every weapon at our disposal."

willstone@peoples-press.com