A CALL for the government’s flagship Health and Social Care Bill, currently before Parliament, to be withdrawn is due to surface at Cheshire West and Chester Council on Thursday (February 23).
Labour councillor Paul Dolan is asking the Tory controlled authority to ‘note the extensive opposition from professional bodies representing doctors, nurses and allied healthcare staff’
‘Their support in delivering these or any future health reforms would be crucial and the absence of that support is the cause of great disquiet,” Cllr Dolan believes.
The introduction of a ‘top down’ re-organisation of the NHS at a time when health and social care bodies, including those in Cheshire
West and Chester, are committed to working more closely together to support care for patients and service users ‘is an unfortunate
distraction’ he believes.
“The introduction of market-place solutions, enforced by competition requirements, would seem to undermine both the need for greater clinical cooperation and finding common solutions across health and social care to the enormous financial and demographic challenges,” Cllr Dolan argues.
He says that although ‘a significant number of amendments have attempted to redress some of the more damaging aspects of the Bill’, the volume and piece-meal nature of the changes which have been put forward ‘suggest the Bill was from the outset ill-conceived and unworkable’
“The changes in themselves create an inconsistent even chaotic Bill that has neither achieved the coherence, clinical or democratic consensus required to succeed,” adds Cllr Dolan.
He is calling on the council to ask for the Bill to be withdrawn.
