Diary date! Free TTIP film screening

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - or TTIP - will have far-reaching implications on the NHS. To find out more, come along to a free screening of The Trouble With TTIP, a one-hour documentary.

Linda Kaucher from the Stop TTIP campaign will be on hand to answer your questions about what can be done to stop this secret US/EU trade deal.

Date: Thursday 3 September

Time: 7.30pm

Venue: Gorringe Park pub/cinema, 29 London Rd, Tooting, SW17 9HW. The pub is right next to Tooting Railway Station between Amen Corner and Figges Marsh.

Click here to find the event on Facebook.

Here is a short video to tell you more:

CCGs (or why campaigning to save the local hospitals is so hard...)

Campaigning to save your local health services often feels like being at the foot of a mountain. You start to climb, you feel like you've made some progress, and then someone at the top of the mountain drops a giant bucket of mud down the slope and you're pushed back where you started from. And you're covered in mud so you might feel a bit demoralised as well.

Additionally, it can be hard to know where to direct your complaints, demands and questions about threats to your local health services. And, even if you do know, it can be hard to then mobilise people en masse to join the fight.

It is all well and good to be angry at the government and the Health Secretary. But we also need to be aware of how NHS England now works as a result of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which was voted in by the Conservative and Liberal-Democrat MPs in the last parliament.

This act created the Clinical Commissioning Groups - the CCGs.

CCGs operated in every region of the country. They make the big decisions. They hold the pursestrings. They have been allocated budgets and it is they who make the decisions about what health services the NHS will fund in your local area.

When you see the phrase "postcode lottery" bandied about in the mainstream media about patients being denied treatment or patients receiving treatment that may be perceived as a poor use of public money, it is the CCGs that are making these decisions.

The postcode lottery situations we see today are a result of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Therefore, it is somewhat curious that when the media reports on postcode lottery NHS stories that this pernicious act of parliament is never mentioned. This week, the Daily Mail screamed at us about "Doughnuts and pizzas on the NHS"! This is the sort of journalism that relies on short attention spans and people not properly reading articles. This report, about patients with coeliac disease receiving gluten-free food on prescription, mentions how the system works but only in passing with a "NHS rules for prescribing food vary area by area" and the occasional "some NHS trusts" thrown in for good measure.

No mention of the role of CCGs in all this. That'd be the CCGs created by a government the Daily Mail supported then and, in its Tory outright majority form, supports now.

And it's not just the Daily Mail offering poor information on this story. Carole Malone writes a context-free opinion piece for the Mirror that seems to imply that the NHS has degenerated into a profligate cake shop for all. And the Daily Express fumes in a similar manner with no mention at all of how gluten-free food on prescription varies from region to region.

It also comes as no surprise that the Daily Telegraph, a long-time cheerleader for the Conservative Party, did not mention regional variations, CCGs or the Health and Social Care Act.

The Independent offers an opinion piece from a coeliac patient which at least calls out the reporting as "alarmist" but there is still no mention of CCGs or the Health and Social Care Act.

The BBC this morning, to its credit, did indeed mention CCGs when reporting on this story on the breakfast programme. But if you didn't happen to be tuned in to BBC1 at around 8.30am today, you probably missed the lesser-spotted CCG mention.

So what on Earth does all this have to do with saving Epsom and St Helier Hospitals?

Quite a lot, actually. The media hysteria over gluten-free food on prescription, while certainly a topic worthy of discussion, has become part of the NHS-bashing narrative of the mainstream media. As long as there is a drive to denigrate the NHS at every opportunity by a compliant media, the CCGs, and indeed the whole system that has created them in Westminster, will go unchallenged.

The mainstream media cannot be bothered to remind the public about how the NHS is now structured with CCGs or how that happened when they report on such stories, even though this is 100% relevant.

And here, in our end of South-West London/Surrey, we have been challenging the local CCGs, which are grouped under the umbrella of South West London Collaborative Commissioning, about their plans for Epsom and St Helier Hospitals as well as their declarations of interest.

If only the media would join us in this endeavour.






Photography by Maliz Ong

KOSHH speaks out on CCG staff taking lavish trips

The Epsom Guardian today reported that staff from Surrey Downs CCG and North West Surrey CCG went on a luxury spa trip to Germany funded by a pharmaceutical company.

Click here to read the story online.

We were asked to comment and, in short, we smell a rat. Why would it be necessary to go to a luxury spa in Germany to discuss a constipation drug? We understand that the NHS needs to buy drugs from pharmaceutical companies. It would be impractical for the NHS to start manufacturing every single drug it requires, obviously. But we do not understand why Clinical Commissioning Group staff would accept lavish hospitality from these companies?

The CCG system is problematic. It is undemocratic. It is clearly part of a larger agenda to privatise the NHS. There are members of CCGs with vested interests in healthcare. How can anyone who stands to win an NHS contract be in a position to commission such contracts?

Now we have supposedly independent commissioners taking luxurious trips at the expense of pharmaceutical companies. How is this OK?

The Surrey Downs CCG Director of Commissioning and Strategy, James Blythe, defended the trip. He said that Cosmocol, the constipation drug discussed on the trip, had already been commissioned before the trip took place.

But Cosmocol is not the only drug in Stirling Anglian Pharmaceuticals' range. Click here to see what else they have on offer. They also sell an osteoporosis drug. And who's to say the company won't add more products in the future?

Surrey Healthwatch communications officer, Lauren Ter Kuile, said that nobody has been in touch to suggest there was anything untoward about this trip.

Lauren, now we know about this and we thank Chris Longhurst from the Epsom Guardian for informing us, we are indeed suggesting that there is plenty that is untoward about this trip.

Will this lead to a change in policy? Are more CCG members taking trips at the expense of private companies? The public deserves to know and deserves better.

Asking questions of the Epsom-St Helier Trust: Part II

We are still asking questions about the Epsom-St Helier Estates Review document via Twitter. This is not a simple review of bricks and mortar, it is a review with far-reaching implications for our local hospitals.

Click here to download your copy of the Estates Review. It is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the future of our local health services.

In our online discussions with the trust, we have asked about how they plan to publicise the review and the feedback period. One of the methods that was mentioned was leaflets. As a small campaigning group, we know how hard it can be to distribute leaflets widely to raise awareness.

However, we thought that a hospital trust might have a few more resources for widespread distribution of leaflets in the catchment areas for Epsom and St Helier Hospitals. A cursory Google search reveals that leaflets can be delivered from £25 per 1,000.

We asked the trust how the leaflets will be distributed. Will they be sent to every household, for example?

Here is the response:

If you see one of these leaflets, please let us know!



Photography by Piotr Siedlecki