The fight for NHS Professionals

We’ve been fighting to keep private hands off our health service. NHS Professionals saves the NHS £70 million every year by providing cheap temporary staff to hospitals around England. Now the government are selling it off, which could easily mean higher costs and worse healthcare. They’re hoping the public won’t notice – but we’ve been making a fuss.

We’ve been spreading the word about the privatisation, and our campaign has been covered by the national media. We spoke to the Financial Times who broke the story at the end of June. Since then the campaign has had coverage from Left Foot Forward and Open Democracy.

Demanding answers

We’ve also been putting pressure on the government in Parliament. The Department of Health have been arranging the sale behind closed doors, so we asked Caroline Lucas MP to get some answers out of Philip Dunne, Minister of State for Health and one of the key players in the sell-off.

Lucas pressed Dunne on four issues. When will the sale happen? Who are the current bidders? How much has been spent on the sale already? And will there even be a public consultation?

But Dunne’s answers were evasive. He said that NHS stakeholders were consulted in 2014, and that they have been kept informed about the sale. But he didn’t tell us anything about the bidders, and said that we’ll only be told how much the sale has cost after it has been agreed. This lack of transparency is staggering. It’s our NHS – we deserve to know what’s going on.

The Early Day Motion

Caroline Lucas is not the only MP standing up to the government. We asked Eleanor Smith MP to table an Early Day Motion opposing the sell-off. An EDM allows MPs to show their support for a cause – if enough MPs sign the NHS Professionals EDM, the government will take notice. After 5,000 of you wrote to your MPs, 29 have stood up for the NHS and signed the EDM (as of 18^th July).

Next steps

We still need your support. Parliament breaks for the summer on Thursday 20^th July, and we need as many MPs as possible to sign the EDM before then. Ask your MP to sign it here!

Over 16,000 of you have signed our petition calling on the government to stop the sale. We’ll deliver this to the Department of Health next week, so please keep sharing it!

If we make enough noise we can stop the privatisation. Let’s keep up the fight!