Mr. Brown’s short-sighted cuts and closures to the NHS are unacceptable and will prove even more damaging in the long-run.
- 38,000 jobs have been cut from the NHS since September 2005
- Last year, almost 7,000 nursing jobs were lost
- Mr. Brown’s own health adviser, Professor Lord Darzi, has said that ‘the days of the District General Hospital are over’
Under Labour, too much money has been diverted from patient care to wasteful bureaucracy. Mr. Brown has imposed 64 central targets on the NHS. As a result, the Government demands 250,000 data returns from all NHS organisations every year. It’s no surprise that the number of NHS managers is now increasing almost three times as fast as the number of nurses.
Doctors, nurses and the public want accessible care. They know that while not every specialist can be at every local hospital, there is no evidence to justify downgrading Accident and Emergency departments or closing maternity units. We believe decisions affecting local services should not be taken by distant politicians or an unaccountable bureaucracy, but by frontline staff in our local NHS on behalf of their patients.
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