National Demonstration – A new deal for working people Saturday 12 May, 11am Victoria Embankment
March to Hyde Park
Coaches LEAVE Derby Bus Station Stand 27 8:00am PROMPT – we cannot wait – … £10 waged/£5 low waged/Free unwaged & claimants
Book as soon as possible with mozgreenshields@gmail.com or text 07889 274723 Last chance to book seats? by Wed’s 9th May Midday
Why are we marching? Because real wages are still lower than before the crash in 2008. Because three million workers are stuck on zero hour contracts, in agency work and in low paid self-employment. Because hardworking public servants haven’t had a proper payrise for eight years. Because our NHS is at breaking point. And because years of cuts have led to poverty, homelessness and despair for too many.
We’re marching for the alternative. For a growing economy with great jobs in every nation and region of the UK. For a £10ph minimum wage and the right to a voice at work. For public services that are brilliant, funded and free at the point of use. And for a society that roots out racism, sexism and discrimination.
*End the winter crisis with a cash injection to restore the NHS budget
*Commit to increased funding each year
*End the cap on NHS pay
*No cuts, no closures, no privatisation
Join the demonstration in London On Saturday 3 February.
Dear Friends
Our NHS is in a serious crisis. Ambulances queuing for hours to hand over seriously ill patients, patients left in corridors waiting for beds, operations postponed, and mental health patients taken hundreds of miles to find a bed.
Theresa May & Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt issued a hollow apology and deny any crisis! But the problem comes from deliberate government policy of cuts, bed closures, pay restraint and privatisation.
Our NHS has been starved of funding with inadequate investment in staff and resources. 8,000 front line beds and 20% of mental health beds have closed. Eight years of below inflation pay settlements have contributed to 100,000 vacant posts for health professionals – leaving no spare capacity for peaks of demand & increasing the pressure on the dedicated staff who remain.
We don’t want apologies, we demand change.
On 3 February Health campaigns together are organising a national day of action – an emergency demonstration in London and nationwide protests to demand:
End the winter crisis with a cash injection to restore the NHS budget
Commit to increased funding each year
End the cap on NHS pay
No cuts, no closures, no privatisation
Join the demonstration in London On Saturday 3 February.
Coaches are leaving Derby Bus Station at 8:00am. Book tickets from mozgreenshields@gmail.com or text 07889 274723. Tickets are £10, £5 concessions, and free for the unwaged. SOS NHS DERBY is asking all our supporters to come along.
Coaches are leaving Chesterfield Town Hall, Rose Hill, S40 1LP) at 8:00am. Phone or text 07778480484 to book a seat.
Protest and present the ‘protect the 535 beds’ petition to the County Council on Wednesday the February 7, 1.30 pm.
Don’t forget that supporters from across Derbyshire will be attending the Derbyshire County Council Full meeting on Wednesday 7th February, at County Hall, Matlock, at 1.30 pm.
The plan is to protests outside then present the petition against the plan to cut 535 hospital beds to the Council. (If you haven’t signed the petition please do so, we still need a few hundred signatures to trigger the 30 minute debate).Click on this link to say you will join us
Four consultants at an accident and emergency department have quit over fears of the future of the service at the NHS hospital, it has been reported.
The doctors at Alexandra Hospital in Redditch have handed in their resignations in what has been described as a “mass exodus” by a leading campaigner.
An “urgent transition plan” has been put in place by Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, who says services will continue as normal despite potentially having to find replacements.
One other member of staff from Worcestershire Royal Hospital, which is managed by the same trust, has also quit.
The doctors have been offered jobs at Warwick Hospital after their “continuing uncertainty” about the future of services at Alexandra Hospital, which is said by Malvern Gazette to be struggling to reach targets and treat a higher number of patients.
Out of a total of 3,109 admissions to A&E at both hospitals, 469 people were made to wait longer than four hours to see a doctor and performances are feared to get even worse, the local paper reported.
Dr Richard Taylor said he is not surprised the consultants resigned
Leaving terms, including notice periods, will be discussed over the coming days, said The Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust said in a statement.
The statement added: “We would wish to stress that services will continue to be provided as normal and an urgent transition plan will be put in place in conjunction with stakeholders to ensure that patients can continue to receive safe and high quality urgent care going forward.”
Dr Richard Taylor, the former Health Concern MP, described the resignations as a “mass exodus” caused by the delay of a review into hospital services in Worcestershire.
Consultants had been “left in limbo” over the future of the A&E department – Dr Taylor, who represented Worcestershire’s Wyre Forest constituency from 2001 to 2010, said.
Privatisation promised to turn the UK into an island of small shareholders. It failed: the faceless state bureaucrats have been replaced by faceless (better-paid) private bureaucrats – and big foreign corporations. How did we get to this point?
European state railways now own more than a quarter of Britain’s passenger train system
Train fares are going up. We learned that last week, although “learn” is putting it strongly. We knew they would. It’s not as if they would go down: train fares go up, like electricity bills, gas bills, water bills, rent and chief executives’ salaries. To the loyalists of the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron succession, higher train fares are a positive, because they mean lower subsidies: another incremental step in a 35-year programme to shift the burden of paying for infrastructure from the well-off to the strugglers. To most of us, it’s another sign of the folly of selling off the railways. But amid the dismal annual round of fare rises, it’s easy to miss another, stranger, more gradual sign of the failure of the vast social and economic experiment conducted on the British people since 1979: privatisation.
A trio of awkward synthetic words has begun to appear among the owners of private train companies that looks as if a computer has been asked to name the new musketeers: Abellio; Govia; Keolis. What these bland corporate signifiers mask is state-owned but commercialised European rail firms. Collectively, European state railways now own more than a quarter of Britain’s passenger train system.
Secret Teacher reveals the nightmare that unfolded when their primary school was forced to become an academy, and how existing staff were nothing more than collateral damage
• More from The Secret Teacher
There is no going back to academy teaching for this week’s Secret Teacher. Photograph: Robert Read Road Signs/ Alamy.
The primary school I worked in had been in turmoil for the last few years – frequent changes of headteachers and policies had led to falling results and behaviour problems. A new head took over but it seemed like a mountain to climb; Ofsted had called and we had been found wanting.
We felt we were turning a corner, results had started to go up and the most challenging behaviour was being managed. But it wasn’t enough – Ofsted returned and their verdict was handed down: progress insufficient, teaching poor. Inadequate, inadequate, inadequate. Then we received a letter – we were to become a forced academy.
The governing body met with the staff to explain the situation. They could vote on whether or not to accept academy status but were informed – in a move worthy of Heller – that if they resisted the changes they would be sacked and replaced with an interim executive board who would implement the changes anyway. The academy sponsor had been chosen for us: a chain with very limited primary experience and much more familiarity with far “leafier” areas than ours.
Meetings were held between the staff, and the academy chain sent a dozen of their staff in to look at us. They were lined up on one side of the room looking at us with suspicion and a hint of fear, as if we might attack at any time. Us against them – as it was to remain. In fact they had nothing to fear – the older hands had been through too much to have the emotional strength to rebel; they were just too beaten down. The younger hands were quiet because they wouldn’t be staying. By the end of the year we had five teaching vacancies.
Before the end of the year the children were asked to design a logo for the new school uniforms. A winner was chosen and their design was to form badges on the new school jumpers. But when the new jumpers arrived in September the design was missing, replaced by a corporate logo. It really symbolised how much the school community’s voices had been listened to.
‘Contrary to popular belief, attendances have stayed static since 2003 in what the Department of Health calls type 1 units – the big hospital-based A&E departments.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond
Not a week passes without a news story about A&E departments: seventhreatened with closure in London; ambulances queueing around the block as patients wait for hours to be seen; insufficient staff; high spending on locums. Emergency medicine is a tiny speciality, with fewer than 4,000 doctors in contrast to 32,000 GPs – and yet it consumes an inordinate amount of airtime. Why?
A&E is the canary in the mine; it tells the story of what is going on elsewhere in the service. Cuts, competition and the fight for survival are at the heart of the story. Over the past 20 years many hospitals and A&E departments have been closed, usually as part of private finance initiative projects: what drove the closures was the high price of PFI, not changing patient needs.
Hospital beds have been lost at a rapid pace too, not because there isn’t a need for them, but because the government is paving the way to divert patients to the private sector in the future, or removing NHS services to allow foundation trusts to generate income from private patients. Over two and half decades successive governments have closed over 50% of NHS beds. In 2013/14 there were 135,000 NHS beds compared with 297,000 in 1987/88. England now has one of the lowest number of beds in Europe and the highest bed occupancy – over 100% in some specialities – which means medical patients are being displaced on to surgical wards, leading to cancelled elective surgery and increased waiting times.
Derby People's Assembly 