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Health Service Cuts

ASSEMBLY SHAME

Health Service Cuts - the Weakest Link

Our representatives in the Northern Ireland Government are targetting the most defenceless members of the community. The Assembly has decided to impose savage health service cuts on Care of the Elderly, Childcare, and Mental Health.

As an example of what the Assembly plans for the Northern Ireland Health Service, two wards will be closed in Knockbracken Hospital in the Belfast Health Service Trust area. As a result, mixed-sex wards will be created. And if plans go ahead, young people and minors will be placed in an Adult Admission Ward.

Patients, relatives and nursing staff are outraged by this breach of standards and good practice.

Closure of wards means that many patients cannot be admitted to hospital.

This places a massive extra burden on the community health service which attends to patients in their own homes.

The Northern Ireland Assembly expects the Community Health Services to be able to nurse those people who cannot now get hospital beds. Unfortunately this is impossible. The Community Health Service has already been weakened by cuts, privatisation and outsourcing, in which Health Service staff have been replaced by not-for-profit organisations and privatised health service provision. Monitoring and supervision are vital to maintain a quality service. But the dire conditions under which the privatised services operate mean that this is no longer possible.

How much worse will it get when hospitals refuse admission to seriously ill patients because of the reduction in the number of hospital beds?

A major crisis threatens the Mental Health Service. The core of the problem is the determination of the Northern Ireland Assembly to load its budget problems onto the section of the population which is has the least capacity to engage in political resistance to the cuts. This is a disgraceful act of cowardice by our political representatives.

Editorial Notes:

The Assembly has resolved on a 10 per cent across-the-board reduction in the NI Health Service Budget (approximately one billion pounds in the Belfast Trust Area), to be spread over three years, starting last year (2008).

The cuts are predominantly focussed on Care of the Elderly, Childcare and Mental Health. This is sheer political opportunism, based on fear of electoral consequences of targeting the more visible parts of the health service. The elderly, the children and the mentally ill have been selected to take the brunt of the government's cuts policy. This amounts to discrimination against these sectors, and may be in breach of Section 75 of the Good Friday Agreement, which prohibits discrimination, not just on grounds race and religion, but also of disability, age and gender. (The majority of the elderly are women, many of whom have spent their lives caring for others, and whom it is shameful to neglect in their declining years.)

In the Belfast Health Service Trust area alone, proposed Health Service cuts amount to £137 million. The NI Assembly says the cuts will be Efficiency Savings in administration, and they pretend that frontline services will not be affected. THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE, since non-frontline health service costs are only 4 per cent of the total health service budget. Even if the total administration budget was cut, this would not achieve the ten per cent target.