Bevan’s Run for the NHS

This coming Sunday sees the end of Dr Clive Peedell’s initiative Bevan’s Run in protest against the Health Reform Bill, at Richmond House, Whitehall, approximately 2pm. This bill is in its last stages in the House of Lords despite strong opposition from most bodies representing healthcare professionals. It represents a final death-blow to the NHS as we’ve known and loved it, and threatens to throw the system into even more chaos than was caused the internal market and recent cuts. Keep Our NHS Public has a good run-down of the problems the Bill will set up for both patients and professionals, and they’ve been busy galvanising last-ditch efforts to block the bill’s passage. Do look at their website for both what is wrong with the bill and ways you can help oppose it – it’s not too late. We’ll be there on Sunday with our banner to cheer Dr Peedell, please join us!

Problems getting physio at FHC

On Monday 16 January 7.30pm, the newly renamed ‘Health Scrutiny Committee’ (formally the Health and Wellbeing Review Committee) will be looking at the provision of Physiotherapy at Finsbury Health Centre in the wake of the many complaints about restrictions in the service there. Our latest information is that the person from Whittington Health (the ‘provider body’ now responsible local primary care services) who was supposed to come along and answer questions about this has cancelled, but the issue is still on the agenda, so do come along if you’ve had problems getting physio appointments at FHC or are worried for its future.

Articles re FHC

In the autumn both the Clerkenwell Post and the Islington Archaeology and History Society ran stories about the campaign to save Finsbury Health Centre. Here is the Clerkenwell Post article and the one from IAHS is available on application to the Society. Thanks to the editors of both for their interest.

Your Britain - Fight for it Now!

In a last-ditch effort to express public disapproval of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Reform Bill, which starts its process through the House of Lords next Tuesday Oct 11, many along with UKUncut and Keep Our NHS Public are preparing to block Westminster Bridge tomorrow (Sun 9 Oct) from 1-6pm. More info on this link. We’ll be there with our banner made from Abram Games’ famous WWII poster ‘Your Britain – Fight For It Now’. For people who can’t make it there, both the TUC and 38Degrees have put up sites to make it easy to write to a Lord of your choice to urge them to block this bill. Here’s a handy online list of contact emails and telephone numbers of Liberal and crossbench Lords.

As many, including SaveFHC have pointed out, much of the groundwork for this bill was laid by the last Labour government with its promotion of an internal market within the NHS, the opening up of NHS services to private contractors via the ‘World Class Commissioning’ programme and PFI contracts. As it stands, however, the current bill will bring in a wholesale auctioning off of services to ‘any qualified (org. willing) provider’, a proliferation of quangos to oversee commissioning – doubling them at the last count, and the abolition of the Secretary of State of Health’s responsibility for the NHS. In short, chaos, cuts to services, conflicts of interest for GPs and even less democratic accountability than before.

In terms of immediate effects for our campaign, it seems that NHS property will be transferred to which ever body provides over 50% of the service provision. We thought at first this meant FHC would go to Whittington Health, which is forming a Foundation Trust which includes both the hospital and primary care services in Islington. At the Whittington Health AGM, however, it seems that they are resisting taking over responsibility for the building in 2013, which makes the formation of a community trust to take over refurbishment and management of the building all the more urgent. This is underway, and progressing towards charitable status.

Hopefully one day we’ll be able to look back on this period as a whole as one of collective madness. In the meantime, see you at the bridge?

Tomorrow (31 August) is the last day for the Wellcome Trust’s excellent exhibition ‘Dirt’ which features two original Cullen cartoons explaining the design of Finsbury Health Centre.

Health Bill crunch time

The third reading of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill is scheduled next week for the 6 & 7 of September, after which (if approved) the bill will go to the House of Lords. Not much in the bill has changed in the wake of the government’s ‘Listening Exercise’ earlier this year, and many bodies of health professionals are still calling for the bill to be scrapped. See Keep Our NHS Public’s website for updates and links to more information about the bill and action against it.

There will be events across the country on 3 & 4 September as part of the Big NHS Weekend -  details here. In addition The NHS Support Federation has put up a site for emailing MPs and councillors easily here. The TUC has started an online vigil to coincide with an actual vigil at Parliament starting at 9am Wed 7 Sept. A march is planned to leave from St Thomas’s Wed 6.30 to which will join the vigil at Parliament. GPs have also organised their own petition against the bill here. Earlier this month Dr Wendy Savage of Keep Our NHS Public had this letter published in the Guardian. If you need even more reasons why the bill is such a bad thing the campaign group 38 Degrees has just published this advice from their legal experts who have examined the bill in detail – it also provides a facility to write directly to your MP about it.

If, as seems likely, the bill passes the Commons this week, it goes to the House of Lords. The TUC also has started an ‘Adopt a Peer’ webpage to lobby them against the bill. Privatisation has caused enough disruption to the NHS already, the further encrochment provided for in this bill will destroy it altogether.

After the many years of neglect and recent disruption – is there going to be some sort of topping off party for the staff? When the idea was floated to the PCT, it was neither confirmed nor ruled out. Their reply suggested they hadn’t thought of having one.

Meeting tonight

SaveFHC certainly has something to celebrate. Reportedly the PCT is now looking to use the building for healthcare ‘for the long term.’. This is better than the last consultation’s assertion that ‘there are no plans to move any other services (besides orthotics) out in the foreseeable future’. Hopefully with a shiny new (non-conflicting with NHS brand identity) name to be decided at tonight’s (Thurs) 7.30pm meeting in St Clements Church, Kings Square EC1, the mooted Finsbury Health Centre Community Trust will be able to complete its paperwork over the summer. Tom Cordell has offered to do a showing of his film ‘Utopia London’ as a fundraiser. It begins with Lubetkin and Finsbury Health Centre, and has been shortlisted for an award at the Open City London Documentary Festival and screens this Friday June 17.

Health reforms: Pause, then onward into the fog

No need to labour this point since it has been all over the press this week. The best summations of the changes were in the Health Services Journal and on the BBC website. For background on how the NHS has ended up in this pickle, see the New Left Project’s ‘The NHS: Anatomy of a Demolition’ Part 1 and Part 2, which traces market encroachment on the NHS over the last 20 years.

Based on SaveFHC’s fight, which started two years before the election, the irony of all this is that Lansley could have had the same amount of market influence only slightly slower if he’d left things alone. Labour had already developed the NHS into the slave of the internal market. With PFI, Independent Supplier Treatment Centres (ISTC), GP admin and management etc., private cherry-picking of the most profitable NHS assets and services had already begun. If the Labour Party wants to offer an alternative to the mash-up which is now Lansley’s bill, it needs to rouse from its long fascination with the market’s ‘transformational’ effect on public services.

Entrepreneurship in many public services has transformed, more often than not, into financialisation – which, if the Southern Cross care homes debacle is anything to go by, can ultimately threaten disappearance.

Finsbury Health Centre is an example of how a group of local councillors set out to solve a clear set of problems and ended up with a building which established basic principles for modern health architecture. (See History)  The key factors for success: they were in touch with their electorate; had empirical evidence about the causes of people’s ill-health and the resources to do something about it; they understood the problems they wanted to solve. All during the 1930s and an economic downturn worse than this one has been – so far. Architect Lubetkin’s principle ‘Nothing’s too good for ordinary people’ established a  public building and service which has been a source of community pride for over 70 years. Why can’t we learn from what works?

A mea culpa from the Labour Party may be too much to ask, but a bolder assertion of a democratic state’s crucial role in paying for and organising basic public services and infrastructure would be a good start.

Active summer

People aren’t taking the Tories’ attempt to finish off the social contract lying down. The PCS, the teachers, London Underground, etc all have plans for strikes in the next few weeks, and groups like UKuncut are organising almost weekly events in and around banks and tax-evading corporate shops. Students in Bloomsbury have been kicking up about the announcement of the private New College for the Humanities, coming as it does with the rise in fees and axing of government funding for social sciences and the humanities. NHS Direct Action and Keep Our NHS Public have been confronting Lansley, the Dept of Health and various private health ‘providers’ with auctions and die-ins for several months, and the Islington Labour Party is meeting about the NHS this Saturday. These can all be followed on their respective websites. Have fun!

Othotics move approved

At the last North Central London (Sector? Cluster?) NHS meeting on 19 May, the move of orthotics/biomechanics was approved by the board after the consultation results showed 79% approval for it. Barb Jacobson asked a formal question about the fact that many responses which suggested that the service be offered both at FHC and in Holloway were not reflected in the report on the consultation (available in Appendix I3 on NCL’s website here) and recieved an answer that it was not possible because of ‘economies of scale’ and ‘lone working on site’ – whatever, should have at least made it into the responses section! The other query was about whether the responses suggesting both sites were put down as ‘approving’ the move, and apparently they were not. The consultation and other papers promise that no other services will be moved, the report reiterates that ‘there are no plans to move any other services from Finsbury Health Centre in the foreseeable future’. We must hold them to that. Worries were raised by another item on the agenda, which was to transfer ownership of NHS property in Barnet to ‘Barnet Community Health Trust’ (there’s that pesky word ‘community’ again) but the Chair of NCL Paula Kahn assured us that the transfer of FHC to any other body is ‘not on the agenda, there are too many uncertainties at the moment’.

£135m cuts to services hidden under QIPP

In typical double-speak, £135 million cuts to PCT services throughout the five boroughs is hidden under the ‘Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention’ programme briefly introduced at the meeting last week. The next NCL board meeting, where these will be finalised, is on Thursday 23 June, 2pm in the Conference Centre at St Pancras Hospital, St Pancras Way NW1. The meeting is ‘in public’.

Saturday 28 May UKuncut ‘Emergency Operation’

This Saturday there will be actions nationwide sponsored by UKuncut to protest the government’s health reform bill and lack of action on reforming the banks. See http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/actions/list to find one near you. If there isn’t one, they’re inviting people to come up with their own here. Follow us on Twitter @SaveFHC (listed to the right on this web page, if it doesn’t appear try http://twitter.com/SaveFHC) for the latest updates. The ‘listening exercise’ is due to finish at the end of May, with a report by the first week of June by the ‘Forum for the Future’. After that there will be a third reading and vote in the Commons before it goes to the House of Lords.

In general, the ‘listening exercises’ have been called at extremely short notice and with the exception of the one being held at the Guardian this afternoon, not widely publicised. This will be ‘live blogged’ by the Guardian here. Apparently the Forum for the Future, which is organising these events, does not take calls about them – there was one last Friday at Voluntary Action Islington, and another at the King’s Fund last Wednesday, which SaveFHC found out by accident!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) evening there will be a march against the bill from University College London Hospital to the Dept of Health, organised by London Keep Our NHS Public and the Health Workers Network, starting from 5.30.

NHSdirectaction has organised several imaginative protests against the bill and has written a guest post for UKuncut summing up actions around the country over the past month. Nationally on Saturday 28 May there will be a day of protests in banks about the Health Reform bill organised by UKuncut.

Finsbury Health Centre

The papers for the Finsbury Health Centre Community Trust were filed with Companies House, but came back demanding that we get permission from the Dept of Health to use the words ‘health centre’ in the name. This has been duly applied for. Building works on both FHC and the Pine St building next door are progressing, and now we finally have the list of the works through a Freedom of Information request, it seems that it is just basic weatherproofing, decorations, and updating of computer connections which staff have needed for several years. There will be a meeting of the North Central London cluster this Thursday, 19 May where the results of the Orthotics consultation will be discussed. Apologies for the long hiatus – since I got back from holiday in April I’ve had to concentrate on fundraising to save my own job in the wake of local government cuts. We hope to have another meeting in early June, will post again when that is arranged.

In the meantime, Finsbury Health Centre figures in the latest exhibition at the Wellcome Trust, Dirt until August. This is a good opportunity to see two of the original Cullen panels explaining the design of FHC, kept at RIBA and rarely on display. FHC also features in Tom Cordell’s film Utopia London, ‘a potted history of the welfare state in London’ (Ikon magazine) which is well worth a look. Screenings can be found here, next one in London is on 17 June. Indeed it is amazing that the NHS, fairly successful organisation, should be up for such changes while the banks, responsible for the biggest collapse in finance since the 30s, are left in tact.

The consultation about relocating Orthotics and Biomechanics to Hornsey St closes this Wednesday. The consultation papers and questionnaire can be viewed and filled out here. While we recognise that offering these services only at FHC is a burden to people who live in the far north of Islington, there is no reason why appointments couldn’t be offered in two places – this option is not offered but please write in with comments. In the meantime, we have received increasing numbers of reports of people feeling forced to have physio at Hornsey Street because of the lack of appointments available at FHC. If this has happened to you, please tell us, but also make sure you make a formal complaint – this can be done online here.

The Finsbury Health Centre Community Trust signed a constitution to form a formal Building Preservation Trust last Monday with a jolly toast at St Clements Church in Kings Square, and is now in the process of filing with Companies House.

Lanlsey’s bill in trouble

Over the weekend, the headlines were all about a retreat in the Telegraph and Independent – so far it looks like only few semantic changes, as lampooned on 1 April by the Health Services Journal in an article which sounded all too true! As well as the overwhelming condemnation of the reforms by professional, patient and local bodies (and even David Owen), ministers may have been rattled by the various street auctions of health services organised by NHS Direct Action, and this particularly spectacular die-in last Friday in front of the Department of Health. The 38 Degrees petition already has 250,000 signatures, and there is another going on in combination which automatically sends your signature to your MP. If you haven’t already, make sure you add your voice to the groundswell of protest.

The PCT may have in the end been snookered into keeping FHC by the cuts, but if we hadn’t been active and tenacious over the past two years the building would now be lying empty, awaiting some unknown fate.

Although you wouldn’t think by now the PCT had anything to lose by telling us what’s going on, the repairs and changes which the PCT are calling ‘a mini-refurbishment’ have been treated with what Cllr Martin Klute called ‘their accustomed opacity’. So far all attempts by SaveFHC to get a detailed list of the works, what exactly they are costing and who is overseeing the builders have been rebuffed. The changes, whether ordered by English Heritage or not, however, have both EH’s and LBI Conservation’s approval. We can only hope they have had a full list themselves, since the reports are of internal walls being moved as I write. In general outline, besides the EH repairs, the rest of the £350k is going on: moving admin up to where the Palin Centre offices were; moving physio – or what’s left of it – up to the ground floor; making more clinical space in the basement.

A paradox as yet left hanging is that while the works need to be done by the end of March but include moving orthotics, the consultation about which doesn’t end until 6 April. The PCT has been asked by Health and Wellbeing Chair to get back on this next week, as well as with a statement of official how many days a week physio is offered.

The bigger picture
Of course if the health bill goes through the uncertainty about FHC’s future will continue. Almost every weekend has seen imaginative protests by UKuncut, including turning Picadilly Boots into a clinic; Keep Our NHS Public has been active and today KONP and NHSdirectaction are holding a rally, with an auction of NHS services, at the BMA special meeting in the Grand Connaught Rooms Gt Queen St WC2 9.15-5pm. There should also be a large NHS contingent on the March for Alternatives on Saturday 26 March. The latest updates are posted on our Twitter feed, which appear on SaveFHC’s blog or can be viewed without an account on http://twitter.com/SaveFHC.

New Constitution for FHC  Community Trust
Because of the future uncertainties, at their last meeting in February the FHC Community Trust decided to turn itself into a full Building Preservation Trust. A draft constitution is now ready based on the model given by the Architectural Heritage Fund. The next meeting is this Thursday, 17 March 7.30pm at St Clements Church, King Square EC1V, hope to see you there.

SaveFHC banner 'Your Britain - Fight for it Now on Islington anti-cuts march, 5 Feb

As reported in the last post, SaveFHC will continue to campaign for the retention and improvement of Finsbury Health Centre and NHS community health services separately from the FHC Community Trust, which will concentrate on issues specific to the building. In the two and a half years since the SaveFHC Campaign started, there have been huge changes in the local NHS, local council and in national politics which have had an impact on the direction of the campaign. While the PCT appear to have been snookered into not selling off and continuing to use Finsbury Health Centre for the time being, their commitment to the building is vague at best. Despite having publicly stated that they would co-operate with our proposed plans for refurbishment, the reality is that the PCT still has not even shared their list of ‘improvements’ to be done with money left over from the Pine St sale after those ordered by English Heritage.

Most people who came to support SaveFHC are also passionate about its role as an inspiration to the NHS. In the wider context, as the government’s plans for the NHS and the impact of cuts to local services becomes clearer, we are not alone in having to defend community services. SaveFHC has supported various initiatives including Keep Our NHS Public (KONP),  the Defend Whittington Hospital Coalition, and Islington Hands Off Our Services (IHOOPS). There are also groups coming up with new and imaginative ways of protesting the latest wave of cuts, particularly UKuncut, and 38 Degrees.

The frequency of area meetings and protests is speeding up. This week alone KONP is having both a meeting tonight at 7.30 in Conway Hall, and a rally this Thursday 17 Feb 6pm outside the BMA in Tavistock Square to protest the changes in the NHS contained in, and coming about in advance of, the current Health and Social Care bill moving through parliament. IHOOPS is marching against cuts to Council services from Highbury Corner 5.30pm also on Thursday 17 Feb. UKuncut is planning ‘Bail-ins’ at various bank branches across the country this Saturday the 19th (Barclays) and the next Saturday the 26th (RBS). 38 Degrees is having a meeting about changes to the NHS at UCL on Tuesday 22 Feb, 6pm Room G.08, Chadwick Building. Last but not least, a massive demo in London against all the cuts is planned in London for Sat 26 March.

With such a plethora of ways to express your support for local council and NHS services…take any opportunity you can to make your voice count. SaveFHC Supporters who would like to take our new banner, a repro of Abram Game’s banned WWII recruitment poster ‘Your Britain – Fight for it Now’  to anti-cuts events are welcome to get in touch with Barb Jacobson at the SaveFHC email address in top left hand corner.

Regardless of parliament still being in the throes of debating the health bill, the NHS seems to be unwinding before our eyes. The meeting agreed it important to have an organisational structure able to legally take possession of FHC if necessary. As far as anyone (including the Government, since there is nothing about what will happen to NHS property in the published bill) knows, the PCT as still a legal entity, if not a ‘governing’ entity, will continue to exist for the next two years and will still own FHC.