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Protest planned over health service fears
Monday 24th May 2010, 8:00PM BST.
A protest will be staged tomorrow amid union fears that Shropshire health bosses are planning to hive off services – including the county’s four community hospitals – to an outside business.
Unite, the largest union in the country, will be lobbying the board meeting of Shropshire County Primary Care Trust over what it says are plans to push for a social enterprise to take over services, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the trust’s 1,200 staff voted against such a move.
The trust says no decision has yet been made but any social enterprise would include local health and GPs.
Michael Tuff, Unite regional officer, said: “The trust agreed to hold a ballot and then when the staff rejected the social enterprise plan, they ignored the wishes of staff and decided to press ahead regardless. This is a sham and a shallow pretence at consultation.”
He said that Unite wanted the status quo to remain, as it was the best way of delivering health services to the public.
In addition to the community hospitals, Shropshire services that could be affected include health visiting and district nursing services, physiotherapy and occupational therapy.
Primary care trusts across the country are currently considering whether they should retain both a service commissioning and service provider role, or offload services.
Paul Draycott, the trust’s director of organisational development and workforce, said the board believed that “a local community-based mode”, working closely with GPs, was the best option to meet patients’ needs.
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Shropshire does not have the population to sustain 2 hospitals, and hardly has the population to sustain one.
If we argue and bicker among ourselves about the provision we think we should have and how it should be provided, we may wake up one morning and find that we are not travelling to Shrewsbury or Telford but to Wolverhampton and Kidderminster.
Does it matter who provides the health services as long as they are local to Shropshire?
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The viability of an essentially privatised but NHS-badged community service provider organisation is far from certain. Telford & Wrekin’s PCT board have already voted, again against another clear majority view of its staff, to go down the untested ‘Social Enterprise’ root and, in doing so, are the only PCT in the Midlands to opt for this thus far. Staff are extremely worried about transfer of terms and conditions and many have declared that they would leave rather than work in a private company. Another problem is that such a move would prejudice the ability to attract new or replacement high quality staff to work in a non-NHS organisation. Shropshire has an enviable reputation in delivering a high standard of community healthcare, these recent developments which fly in the face of the staff who actually do the work will severely threaten this, in my opinion.
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