Rolf Pearce Haywoods Voice Independent Campaigner MATTHEW Ellis from Staffordshire County Council has been seen and heard across the media in recent weeks trumpeting his new healthcare reforms for Staffordshire.
This 44-page document looks and sounds comprehensive and thorough until you actually read it. Of the 44 pages 15 pages are taken up with large print headlines and full page photographs which are not needed to illustrate the points being made so we are now down to 29 pages.
Of the next 29 pages you have a title page and a contents page we are now down to 27 pages. Page 39 and 40 are just blurry pictures so now we have 25 pages. This is a document about how our local health service provision is going to be reformed.
I have taken all of the text and relevant graphs and diagrams and converted the document to normal text you would expect to see in a professional or academic paper. The text comes to just over 10 pages. If you then accept that the county council SHOULD be promoting care for the elderly, children and anti-smoking and relieving poverty you come down to two pages where hidden amongst all the re announcing old policy as new with different pictures you find what this document is really about.
Matthew Ellis will be setting up funding for community based services using money which would normally be used and spent by the NHS and Social Care in Staffordshire.
This is the start of him and others slowly starving the NHS and public social care departments and programmes of funds and channelling money into private providers.
Mr Ellis is keen to point out that this is "What the people of Staffordshire want" but ask yourself, has anyone reading this article actually been asked if that is what they want. I know I haven't and it is not just me who thinks these policies are dangerous, in an article recently even Mr Ellis said these policies are "scary".
Why then should Mr Ellis who by his own admission is a layman in health matters disagree with Clive Peedell Cochair NHS Consultants Association, BMA Council, BMA Political board, and Martin McKee professor of European public health Faculty of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and sociology lecturer David Stuckler, of Cambridge University, who are just three out of thousands of health care professionals who believe the changes the Conservatives are making to our NHS are wrong and have no mandate.
I ask everyone to ask why Staffordshire County Council insists on ignoring a report by the Commonwealth Fund quoted by Baroness Shirley Williams in the house of Lords recently which stated in 2010 that the NHS was the most efficient public service in the world, and had the highest approval ratings except for Denmark.
It seems odd that this respected International healthcare body said this in 2010, and within 18 months Matthew Ellis and Staffordshire County Council believe that the NHS is not fit for purpose.
I know who I believe, but I am wondering what the motivation and drivers are for what Mr Ellis believes. Is this just about the privatisation of the NHS? Crossheads Colwich
