In the final part of our mini-series taking in views on the future of the region’s NHS, Jo Land, from Darlington, and a founder member of national campaign group 999 Call for the NHS, says planned radical changes to services will harm patients

THE new NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) – as they are called – just aren’t sustainable. We are told that the NHS in the ‘Footprint’ for our region will be underfunded to the tune of £281m by 2021 if we do nothing. Are we really supposed to believe that making service cuts to eliminate this deficit will lead to better care? STPs are really based on meeting the target of £22bn savings nationwide by 2020, rather than meeting people’s health needs.

The NHS has been driven into financial crisis due to underfunding, with billions of pounds lining the pockets of private health care firms instead of being spent on patient care.

At the heart of the STPs are new ‘models of care’. Services such as A&E and maternity units will be centralised, with some units being downgraded or closed. Care closer to home could see frail elderly people discharged without a social care package.

You don’t have to look very far to find reasons why these new models won’t work.

In winter 2015 the accident and emergency department at the University Hospital of North Tees, in Stockton, revealed it was struggling under unprecedented pressure with its clinical director Andrew Simpson stating: “There is nothing left, we have reached tipping point.”

Meanwhile, in May 2016 campaign group Fighting 4 Hartlepool Hospital said it learnt that 60 people were waiting in A&E at North Tees at one point and another 16 patients waiting on trolleys due to increased pressure.

Our STP proposes the closure of either Darlington Memorial or North Tees A&E. This is a lose-lose situation, whichever way you look at it. If North Tees A&E closes, Darlington will see unprecedented demand - or vice versa. Queues will lengthen and lives will be at grave risk.

Care closer to home sounds nice, but County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust have previously admitted that there are up to 50 people at any one time occupying hospital beds because no social care is available. Does this sound like a situation in which you can cut community hospital beds?

Throughout the process of drawing up the STPs, secrecy has been the watchword. Clearly, these are no ordinary plans for improving patient care. Local people have struggled to find information in the face of denials by the hospital trusts.

I was one of the organisers of the recent Footprints March for the NHS between eight local hospitals. The day we set off from Hartlepool Hospital for James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough, we were delighted to learn that Hartlepool Borough Council had leaked the STP plan for this region in defiance of NHS England.

One of NHS England’s regional directors has already been quoted thus: “STPs are not meant to be published at all. … Some of them contain very radical things… These are highly political and highly contentious.”

Cost-cutting is not the only reason for these plans. The new models of care proposed by our STP are of the kind that are being pushed by private health companies. They will bring about a US-style system, with personal budgets and rationing, rather than care based on patient need and clinical evidence.

Engagements and consultations on these proposals are a sham. The direction of travel has already been set by an NHS England document called the Five Year Forward View, which champions these new models of care.

The day after Hartlepool Council leaked the STP, we Footprints marchers attended a ‘Better Health Programme’ engagement session after resistance from the organisers. I asked members of the public whether they had seen the STP document recommending the closure of either Darlington or North Tees A&E department? Of course not. I witnessed some people literally shaking with rage because they had not been told this.

If STPs are implemented, it will be the end of a universal, comprehensive, publicly-funded service that is free at the point of use. It will become like NHS dentistry – a difficult to access, limited service of last resort.

We can afford the NHS. We are the sixth richest nation in the world and we spend significantly less on healthcare than most other European countries. The NHS is not being destroyed by ‘health tourism’, which accounts for a tiny portion of NHS expenditure, compared to the billions wasted on privatisation in the NHS. It is being destroyed by this Government.

Local councils have powers to object to STPs. Contracts that will introduce the proposed budget cuts over the next two years were being signed on December 23. Local people will need to move fast to tell their council to oppose them before it’s too late.

STPs are not a prescription for a better NHS. In fact they are a poison and they will cost lives. Don’t swallow them.