Our vision: what do we want?
If the Government wants a strong economy, it can’t afford not to invest in the NHS.
To stop the continued worsening of the crisis in the NHS, we must press the new government to take immediate, concrete steps to relieve the crisis in hospitals, mental health, primary and community care, social care, and end the ongoing staffing crisis. The new government must commit to undoing the work of 14 years of Conservative and coalition governments and take immediate action to provide the NHS with the funding it so desperately needs.
To ensure no more billions are wasted on private contracts, such as we
saw during the pandemic, there must be more investment in our NHS – to restore and expand NHS capacity; repair or rebuild crumbing hospitals; and reopen the unused NHS beds.
It is vital to increase investment in staff, with new targets for
recruitment, training, and levels of pay that would prevent the service
losing more staff.
We also need to build a properly resourced, publicly run national care,
support and independent living service, and invest in public health and policies to tackle huge and growing inequalities in health.
More investment is also urgently needed at the local level to reverse years of cuts and rebuild public health services that have been disastrously reduced and still have not recovered from extra pressure during the worst of the Covid pandemic.
NHS and care staff need pay justice now so that wages keep pace with inflation, and lost wage value is restored. The Junior Doctors have set the standard towards pay restoration and all other NHS staff deserve the same. This is essential to help restore morale and livelihood.
The Government must also listen to the unions: all health workers
should be paid fairly and all outsourced workers must be brought
back in-house.
We will of course need new legislation and a commitment from the new government to re-establish a fully publicly funded and provided NHS, protected from private companies who put profit before patients.
The NHS was once one of the best health care services in the world and could be again.
The model of a universal, free-at-the-point-of-use NHS works. This ‘NHS for all’, publicly owned, provided, and accountable has frequently been ranked one of the best healthcare systems in the world. It is not the model that is broken, it is politicians that have failed the NHS – and the population they are there to serve.
To save the NHS we must have a publicly provided NHS, meaning an end to private involvement; an NHS funded to succeed – not defunded to fail; respect, recognition and decent pay and conditions for all health workers; re-investment in public health and a drive to tackling health inequalities and last of all we must rebuild, restore and expand our NHS so it is there for generations to come.
How will we win the argument?
SOS NHS plans to build the strongest coalition possible between unions, NHS campaigns, health and care staff, patients, social movements and civil society organisations in order to save our NHS from being destroyed by ongoing nder-funding and the damaging effects of privatisation.
Our objective is to communicate effectively with the wider population, using our coalition to extend the reach of our message and our demands for change.
This will require keeping up the pressure on the new Labour government to undo the damage from the last 14 years of Conservative rule, to end the NHS crisis and to deliver the kind of NHS and social care services the population wants and deserves.
We will put maximum pressure on MPs from across the political spectrum by demonstrating the strength of support for the NHS among their constituents.
We believe that the best way to do that is to build a powerful broad alliance.
