East Mendip Green Party has warned that new plans for the NHS will result in poorer services across Somerset, and that the real problem in the health service – collapsing social care and massive budget cuts – is not being addressed.
According to the Somerset Sustainability & Transformation Plan (STP) Somerset is faced with a looming black hole of £175m per year, or cumulatively £596m by 2020/21.
The STP proposes a range of actions to close this deficit including making all of us look after ourselves better, (prevention); reducing the number of hospital beds; concentrating some services into only one of the two acute hospital in Somerset; improving mental health services and expecting far more people to be cared for in their own homes, whilst in total there will be fewer staff.
John Clarke Green Party county council candidate expressed concerns about the plan. “So this is what is called protecting the NHS and ‘safe in our hands’,” he said. He questioned the sustainability and transformation plan suggesting it was ‘more about transforming the NHS to point where it is not sustainable as a national health service for all free at the point of delivery.’
Managers have been asked to devise a plan against a backdrop of further cuts to Local Authority budgets which have already lost £150m and expect to lose a further £40m by 2020/21, including £3.5m from the budget for Public Health over the next four years, and further cuts for Mental Health Services.
The population of the over 75’s already higher than average in Somerset is growing. There will be many fewer qualified staff available to look after the population as existing staff retire – 31% of Somerset GPs are expected to retire in the next 3 years, and hospital staff and nurses are also in short supply.
Martin Dimery, Green Party county council candidate for Frome East added, “What is needed is a reversal of the severe funding cuts to health and social care, and a reversal of the costly privatisation being forced on the NHS by our present Government. To quote Bevan, ‘The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it.’ Are we willing to invest in our NHS and Social Care ? We need to ask our MPs what they are doing about it.”
For more detail on the STP see https://eastmendip.greenparty.org.uk
www.somersetccg.nhs.uk/news/somersets-five-year-health-and-care-plan-published/