the nhs

emma dawnay – green

Our NHS is fantastic, yet the current government believes that “competition” and encouraging provision by private firms will make it better and more efficient. We don’t.  Setting up an internal “market” is costly, inefficient, and impossible to regulate well. Patients come after profit.
 
At the Great Western Hospital in Swindon patients have been put at risk due to the poor hygiene standards provided by penny pinching, tax avoiding private firms.

The Green Party will restore the NHS to a fully accountable public service with a minimal role for commercial companies. Mental health will also be treated as a much higher priority, with increased funding and resources.

Our health policy promotes a healthier society, preventing illness by having a clean environment, encouraging cycling and walking, insulating homes and giving everyone access to a balanced diet.

We will make sure that elderly people are provided with good free social care so that they can stay in their homes for as long as they choose, avoiding hospitalisation due to lack of care at home.  

We believe social care should not be a privilege, but a right.

manda rigby – liberal democrat

The Liberal Democrats are committed to delivering better care for everyone. We are:

•    Improving services across the NHS, with 6,000 more doctors, lower waiting times and giving cancer drugs to 30,000 people.

•    Taking mental health seriously, putting £400m extra into early support.

•    Introducing the first ever cap on the cost of social care, so people don’t have to sell their home to pay for their care.

It was Liberal Democrats who stopped Conservative privatisation plans and reversed some of Labour’s policies which meant private health companies got special favours.

Labour paid private companies £250 million for operations they didn’t even perform. Liberal Democrats have made sure that can never happen again.

Locally we are pushing for better access to A and E units in the constituency, and lowering waiting times for a GP appointment. Personally, I would not support TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership)unless our NHS was fully protected.

chris watts – labour

The NHS faces huge challenges – but instead of facing up to them, the Conservative have wasted billions on a damaging top-down reorganisation that puts competition and private profit ahead of integration and collaboration.

That’s made it even harder for the NHS to deal with people’s needs. The current health and care system is still based on three fragmented services: physical health in the mainstream NHS, mental health on the fringes of the NHS, and social care in council run services. Increasingly, however, people’s needs are a complex mix of the physical, mental and social. For all its strengths, the NHS was not designed to fully recognise this.

Labour is determined to protect and strengthen the NHS and make it fit for the challenges of the 21st Century. That means bringing together the different parts of the service and helping them work together, built around patients, not around bureaucratic silos.

We can put people of all ages at the centre of the health and care system in a way that has never been done before; seeing the whole person, and organising services around the needs of people and their communities. And we can do this without another chaotic top-down reorganisation.

david pollit – ukip

UKIP believes in an NHS free at the point of delivery.  We are committed to funding that principle at all times.  To prevent NHS tourism we would insist that all non-UK citizens must have health insurance when visiting Britain as practised by most European countries.  

Migrants to the UK will also have to have health insurance for the first five years.  We will end the immoral hospital car parking charges.  Locally, we will have county health boards to monitor health services accountable to the people which will be able take evidence from and protect whistle-blowers.  

We will also ensure GP surgeries are open at least one evening per week.  We will stop the use of PFI contracts so beloved by Tony Blair which allows private developers to plunder the NHS budget.  

The NHS budget is for patients not profiteers’. Lastly we will train British medical personnel rather than import them.