The north of Ireland’s Department of Health (DoH) has announced its plan to hack away at an already inadequate health service, aiming for 12% cuts spread over three years. In a statement, the DoH said:

The HSC [Health and Social Care] is currently spending more than £2 million a day over budget so the Reset and Recovery plan aims to restore financial balance, deliver better value for money, and shift investment towards services in the community rather than hospitals, where most funding is currently spent.

The reason that the HSC system is going over budget is because the budget simply isn’t big enough. Austerity policies are still in effect under Labour, meaning north of Ireland health services, like those in England, Scotland and Wales, still aren’t getting the money required to help an ageing population.

Jane Scott of the union Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance (NIPSA) said the budget must be:

…based on the needs of the health service, not based on the figures they can pluck out of the air. It has to be a needs-based budget to cover what the members out in the public need from their health service.

She also commented:

It’s a travesty that they are making cuts within our health service. We need to fight for our health service for our users. The safe staffing that we have saves lives and that needs to be implemented.

Cuts likely to put patient health at risk

People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll agreed, saying:

Cutting services will not fix the crisis we are facing. Our health service needs proper investment to ensure hospital staff are paid fairly, to tackle chronic levels of understaffing, and to prevent ‘corridor care’ from becoming the norm.

There are, of course, some instances of wasteful spending, which Carroll drew attention to earlier in the week. He highlighted a BBC headline drawing attention to trusts shelling out hundreds of thousands on consultants “to reduce health care costs”. In response, Carroll said:

Health service management say we don’t have enough money for the health service but then spends hundreds of thousands of pounds to ask a private organisation how to wield the axe to cut our health service. You couldn’t make it up.

Hollowing out government expertise only to then rely on overpriced private substitutes is a key feature of the neoliberal con scheme. Other wastefulness by Health and Social Care trusts includes an over-reliance on private nursing agencies, something we’ve highlighted previously.

However, rather than reducing waste, these cuts will directly impact essential staff. NIPSA’s Ian Boersma said:

The first in the firing line, we believe, will be the low paid. It’ll be the admin and clerical workers, porters, cleaners.

Stephanie Greenwood of Unison highlighted the danger such cuts pose to patients, saying:

You cannot make these kind of cuts and provide safe and effective services for patients. Nor can you bring any more pressure to the workforce.

The BBCalso quotes Derry physiotherapist Mave O’Neill, who rightly highlighted the short-termist thinking of health care cuts:

It’s absolutely not the time for cuts because cuts don’t work. Investment works when it comes to supporting the health of our community.

Money for war and superyachts — none for healthcare

Aside from the obviously immorality of leaving sick people to rot, having a permanently crocked population unable to access health care is a massive drain on the economy generally. These will be people who then can’t work, or can only work less than they previously could.

O’Neill raised the toll on patients and overworked staff stemming from continuous cuts, saying:

I love my job, and I think everybody who works there does, but it’s really hard when you’re working in a broken system and seeing patients being let down.

We’ve previously described the moral injury endured by health care workers battling to do their job in impossible conditions. They are rapidly losing patience with cruel cuts to services, and loss of pay. The Royal College of Nursing in Northern Ireland has said that:

…industrial action, including strike action, could be imminent as nursing staff continue to be denied a pay award already given to colleagues in other parts of the UK.

Again, this all results from simply not enough money being provided to essential public services. Instead, Westminster throws vast sums away on weapons of mass murder, and the super-rich are allowed to splurge their vast fortunes on obscene trinkets. Meanwhile, the working-class die on stretchers in overcrowded hospital corridors.

We live in an era of unprecedented productive capacity and technology. Things should be getting better, not worse. It isn’t a law of nature that ordinary people have to suffer like this — it’s a political choice. The unions challenging health care destruction are part of the fight to change those choices, but it will need mobilisation across all of society to drive a shift away from our current murderous oligarchic order.

Featured image via the Canary

By Robert Freeman

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