A public meeting of the Hereford and South Herefordshire Labour Party in Ross-on-Wye on January 13th praised the people who work within the health service, but expressed concern at the cuts the National Health Service faces.

The meeting was addressed by Dr Gary Marlowe, a GP for over 30 years working in Hackney, London, whilst resident in Ross-on-Wye and a member of Ross and District Branch Labour Party.

Dr Marlowe informed the meeting that, whilst he believes that the NHS is currently in crisis, by 2018 it will be in meltdown. He said that the proposed £22 billion year on year “efficiency” savings from the most efficient health service, as described by the Commonwealth Fund in 2011, now being enforced by the present Government was to be implemented through the re-organisation of the NHS, through the Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), will lead to further reductions in the service.

He said that by 2020 the UK will have the lowest provision of hospital beds per capita of any OECD country. The STPs are obliged to reorganise health provisions within the strict imperatives of the budgets set by the Government.

He lamented the reduction by 20% of the training programmes for new nurses and doctors which will, he said, further starve the NHS of trained professionals and make them more reliant on importing staff from Europe and the Third World, thus robbing those countries of their trained health care workers.

GPs, stated Dr Marlowe, were experiencing an all time low morale with many taking early retirement and that more work was being transferred to the primary care sector, whilst no additional funding was matching the increased workload.

He feels that GPs do not have the time to provide the support and care to patients that is required and often left their surgeries at the end of the day with a realisation that they had been unable to meet the needs of their patients.

Whilst he believes that integration of Health and Social Care would improve the ability of the combined services to better serve the interests of patients, it was not a means of saving money and would only succeed if funding was restored to Social Care providers.

Gemma Dean, Unison Branch Secretary Herefordshire Health/Deputy Chair Staff Side, told the meeting that Wye Valley Trust was failing both its users and its employees.

She said that there are problems in recruiting and retaining staff at all levels and there was an unacceptably high proportion of agency nursing staff.

Gemma encouraged people to attend meetings of the Wye Valley NHS Trust in order to scrutinise the work of the Trust.

It was also unanimously decided by those attending the meeting to demand the dismissal of Russell Hardy, chairman of Wye Valley NHS Trust.

A spokesman said that the decision was taken because they felt he had a conflict of interests.

They also want the people of Herefordshire to be given the opportunity to democratically elect a new Chair who will put the interests of the NHS and the people of Herefordshire first.