With heavy hearts campaigners celebrate 74th birthday of the NHS
2July 5, 2022 by Protect Our NHS
NHS campaigners gathered outside Bristol Royal Infirmary today (5th July) to celebrate the 74th birthday of the NHS. Handing out birthday cake to staff, patients and passers-by they also displayed placards calling for more funding to cut NHS waiting lists and opposing health privatisation.
A number of shocking stories have revealed the perilous state of the NHS. This has included the scandal of ambulance response times, compounded by the deaths of patients in ambulances kept waiting outside NHS hospital emergency departments.
And a recent report in the Lancet shows NHS privatisation over the last decade has corresponded with a decline in quality and increased rates of death from treatable causes.
Protect our NHS coordinator, Ron Mendel from Westbury-on-Trym, said,
“Waiting lists reveal the health inequalities in our society, as some can jump the queue by accessing private health care while working people and the poor just have to wait.
“And this government has overseen cuts in hospital beds which have contributed to ambulances being unable to deliver patients to A&E departments”
Protect our NHS member Tone Horwood from Totterdown who sits on the executive committee of national campaign group Keep Our NHS Public said,
“There was never £350 million a week for the NHS following Brexit and we now know that Boris Johnson’s promises of 40 new hospitals was a lie.
And despite Government promises of an increase of 6000 doctors by 2024, we have nearly 1600 fewer fully qualified full-time GPs compared to 2015.
“The public knows the NHS is not safe in this government’s hands. It is deliberately being starved of funds as part of its privatisation agenda.
”With a heavy heart on this birthday of the NHS, I am reminded of the words of Aneurin Bevan, the founding father of the NHS: No society can call itself civilised if a person is denied medical care for lack of adequate means.”
Following the passing of the Health and Care Act, as from 1 July new statutory bodies called Integrated Care Services have replaced clinical commissioning groups set up in 2013.
Protect our NHS have campaigned against the Act.
Ron Mendel said,
“This legislation will drastically worsen the state of emergency by imposing costly and disruptive reconfiguration. The Government has doggedly refused to agree to regular workforce review, despite 110,000 vacancies and catastrophic staff morale, yet without an adequate workforce the NHS simply cannot deliver safe and compassionate care.
“This is an Act of intent, deliberately breaking up the NHS and facilitating the spread of parasitic private interests, looking to make billions of pounds from funding for public services.
“It does nothing to address the state of emergency the NHS is now in.”
{END}
Notes for editors
Birthday Cake: Protect Our NHS will be handing out birthday cake between 12 and 1 pm Tuesday 5th July outside the BRI
For more information contact Ron Mendel 07914 502895 or Mike Campbell 07891 432224
Changes in NHS structures: https://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/integrated-care-systems-ics
Protect Our NHS is a non-party-political group campaigning against the privatisation and underfunding of the NHS. We support campaigns to reverse the privatisation and commercialisation of health and social care services and will campaign for high quality, publicly funded, publicly provided and publicly accountable health service provision.
Follow Protect Our NHS on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ProtectOurNHS/ and on Twitter @NHSour
Protect Our NHS 
This is today’s press release from Defend Our NHS (Wirral):
Defend Our NHS (Wirral) would like to thank staff at every level who joined the National Health Service as a vocation because of a caring nature.
We’re sorry that both vocation and calling have been abused by NHS England, this government, and governments before them.
We’re sorry that NHS England has turned itself over to corporate profit interests and has destroyed the ethos of healthcare as a fabric of support for all.
We’re sorry that we were unable to break through the media silence and the refusal to follow up the story of the destruction of the National Health Service. We’re sorry that Wirral councillors didn’t listen.
Last Friday July 1st marked the day that NHS England and this government have finally broken our Health Service. And they are still continuing to persecute it.
We will not be holding any 74th anniversary celebrations on Tuesday 5th July. The NHS as we knew it has been abolished.
We will be contemplating how we begin to re-engage with the public, and with those now in charge to convince them that breaking up the service and copying the USA (the world’s worst) model is NOT THE ANSWER.
Forty-two local postcode lotteries are not a national health service.
The NHS of social justice and equality has been failed.
We’re sorry.
Now the fightback must begin to REINSTATE OUR NHS.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/defendournhs
Further information on what has been done to the NHS can be found at https://www.999callfornhs.org.uk/INTEGRATEDCARE2021
Hi comrades – sorry for delayed reply. But for various reasons we’ve not been able to keep the blog up-to-date. But we gave not been inactive! We’ve been on the picket lines. Mike (on behalf of PoNHS)