UHL: making staff and patients pay!

University Hospital Leicester trust has come up with a ’10 point plan’ of cuts because it says it overspent by £8m on the first few months of this year. The trust is applying to become a Foundation Trust and also needs to make £158m worth of cuts over the next five years as a result of the government’s spending cuts.

Yesterday, the Head of Finance Andrew Seddon announced to staff that there will be more than 400 jobs slashed by the end of March 2012. There will also be a rise in car-parking charges. This is on top of 200 staff not being paid for over-time for this month and being threatened they may not be paid at all next month!

This will mean that while hundreds of people will be thrown on the dole queue, there will be over-worked and under-paid staff in the hospitals who cannot give patients the care and attention they need. And patients and their friends and relatives will have to pay more to visit the hospital!

Liberal Democrat member, and candidate for the by-election in Leicester South this year, has been quoted in the Leicester Mercury as saying “I am disappointed that car parking charges will be going up but the reality is a choice between that and patient care.” The Socialist Party completely disagrees!

Billions of pounds go uncollected in tax each year, money that is owed to the country by the rich but is not paid. Yet the government is attacking public services and working class people rather than those who caused the economic crisis! There is enough money in the hands of the rich to provide good quality, free health care for all, including the ability to park at the hospital for free; staff can be employed on the basis of need and not profit – and receive the pay that they are entitled to!

A campaign of staff and service users should be launched to defend the NHS in Leicester. Unfortunately, the trade union that represents workers in the hospital, UNISON, has done little-to-nothing on this issue. UNISON members should be demanding that the union urgently holds an all-members meeting to discuss action to prevent these brutal attacks.

Socialist Party members in Leicester support Leicestershire Against the Cuts (LAC), a broad campaign against all cuts to jobs and services, no matter which party makes them. The group is holding an ‘Assembly Against the Cuts’ on 24th September at Highfields Community Centre (more details to follow). Staff and patients effected by these attacks should come along and join the fightback!

Visit the LAC website here.