Announced today by UKIP’s Health Spokesman Louise Bours:
- Keep the NHS free at the point of delivery
- £3bn more invested in to NHS directed to frontline services
- Dementia funding £130m per year in line with what Alzheimer’s Research UK say they will need
- License to manage: as doctors and nurses are licensed so should medical management. Negate the drift of disgraced hospital managers being fired only to find another job elsewhere within the health service
- Abolish CQC- inspections would be taken up by local health board,who would also be encouraged to take evidence from whistleblowers and patients with grievances. Media have closed down more failing establishments than CQC
- Merging health and social care is a priority to enable more joined up integrated patients management
- Elderly social care funded with £1bn per year
- Hospital parking charges scrapped £200m which we would find from tackling health tourism which costs up to £2bn per year
- Scrap tuition fees for medical students (on a means tested basis). Train nurses on wards and reinstatement of SEN (State Enrolled Nurse) to encourage more home grown medical talent
- Auxiliary staff should be able to work towards becoming an SEN
UKIP, the people’s army, have asked the people what they want the NHS to be. Real people, people like you, not Westminster focus groups, and as a result, all of UKIPs policies are rooted around four key principles:
- There must be an unwavering focus on patient care and patient outcomes. These must always come first in decision-making.
- The NHS will remain free at the point of delivery and in time of need for all British citizens and qualifying foreign nationals.
- UKIP pledges an additional £3 billion more for the NHS every year; an affordable sum paid for ultimately by the savings we will make from leaving the European Union, but in the shorter term from other savings we will identify within our manifesto. We will insist this money goes into frontline resources, yes that’s real doctors, nurses and care, not middle management or expensive spin doctors.
- UKIP is committed to tackling PFI debts, excess bureaucracy, wasteful spending and abuses of NHS treatment. The taxpayer should not be paying for these failures; we will confront these challenges to release even more funds into front line services.
UKIP is particularly keen to encourage the 40% of women GPs who leave the profession before the age of 40, back into the surgery. We will do this by allowing women to take time out from their five-year free tuition fee qualifying period to have families if they wish, and by not charging either women or men for their own re-training on returning to the profession.
To cut GP waiting times UKIP will also free GPs from the burden of unnecessary data collection, target chasing, revalidation and appraisal work that actively prevents them from engaging with patients.
These measures will ensure GPs can meet UKIP’s requirements to open surgeries at least one night a week and one weekend a month in order to meet demand.
UKIP will:
- Increase funding for mental health services to improve and speed up access to treatment for both adults and children as part of our £3 billion injection into the NHS.
- Ensure there is capacity for all pregnant women and mothers of children under the age of 12 months to have access to specialist mental health treatment.
- Make sure clinicians take a ‘whole person’ approach to physical and mental health, signposting patients diagnosed with debilitating long-term conditions to local mental health services, and ensuring those diagnosed with a mental illness are given support.
We will cut bill for health tourism by insisting migrants, students and visitors to Britain must have approved medical insurance.
UKIP will integrate health and social care, bringing both back under the control of the NHS with funding merged into one ‘social care fund.’
We will initiate pilot programmes in English hospitals to put at least one GP on duty in every A&E department during the week, and provide additional weekend GP cover, to ease the burden on A&E staff who need to treat more seriously ill patients. If this pilot succeeds in its aim to ease pressure on existing A&Es, then we will roll the programme out across the country.
UKIP expects home care agencies to pay the minimum wage to their staff, and to pay them on duty or in training. There is no excuse for a big care company to hire anyone on a zero-hours contract, or to not pay them when they are travelling between appointments, or ‘on call.’
We will scrap the Care Quality Commission and put its remit into local County Health Boards with the power to do unannounced, spot checks across all local NHS and social care services.
We will fund a ‘Coordinating Service for Older People’ unit in every local authority. This service will cross the boundaries between the NHS, Social Services, Community Agents and the voluntary sector. It will be responsible for ensuring that these organisations work together effectively, it will help charities seek out volunteers to join be-friending schemes, it will be pro-active in identifying people who may need support or company, it will make sure they know what is available, and, where there are gaps, it will find ways to fill them.