• THE £2million diverted from patient care to private consultancy firms to set up the local five-year Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) to get rid of the NHS is indicative of how the public are misled about health service finances. The 44 obscure STPs are grinding on out of sight.

They are geared to creating a permanently underfunded and much poorer quality alternative health care system for those who don’t pay to see a doctor.

There is still a chance to expose and challenge the plans. Many doctors are convinced they would lead to unacceptably low standards of patient care and say they are unworkable.

While full funding of the true public NHS is called for, it is critical to ensure that all of it goes directly to public NHS patient care by providing more well-qualified, experienced medical staff and good facilities.

There is a huge blurring of boundaries and budgets between private company and public NHS health care.

Taxpayers and NHS patients are paying all the costs and receiving fewer and fewer benefits.

We need to be clear about what supports NHS values and principles and what defeats them. What gives us value for money in a full, genuine, cost-benefit analysis. What is and isn’t the NHS.

If enough people appreciate that the true public NHS has been – until the 2012 Health and Social Care Act – the most affordable quality care of all and for all, it would be possible to support and recover the NHS.

This has nothing to do with nostalgia.

It is about being relevant and modern. It is all about practicalities and what works, including the elimination of the enormous waste and subsidising of the market system distorting and depleting the NHS.

It is entirely reasonable and sensible to insist on having a true NHS, the one we have all shared and taken pride in, the one so essential to the social and economic wellbeing of the country.

SHARON LYTTON
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