“We will end health service privatisation and bring services into a secure, publicly-provided NHS. We will integrate the NHS and social care for older and disabled people, funding dignity across the board and ensure parity for mental health services.”
Jeremy Corbyn’s vision for the NHS will reverse the marketisation of health, integrate social care and improve staff morale to build a high quality, public and universal NHS free at the point of delivery.
Bringing our NHS back into public hands
We will bring our NHS back into public hands. Scotland and Wales have reversed marketisation and restored their NHS without massive upheaval – England can too.
We will introduce legislation to not just repeal the Health and Social Care Act, but that will unpick the 25 years of marketisation, end the purchaser-provider split and return the NHS to an accountable public service run in the public interest.
Sustainable funding by tackling the private sector involvement in our NHS
The Government continues to sign off new Private Finance Initiatives which are a large drain on NHS resources and creates financial destabilisation in the system, staff shortages and cutbacks. We must tackle this funding crisis and put the NHS back on a long term sustainable funding basis.
We will use our National Investment Bank to buyout organisations from their PFI schemes, we will not renew PFI contracts and we will investigate establishing a PFI Monitoring Unit to ensure compliance with contracts and to cancel contracts where they are not adhered to.
Modern, integrated health and social care
Creating a modern, integrated health and social care system not only means bringing our NHS back into public hands and properly funding it, it also means a system that places importance on public health and establishes parity for mental health and delivers responsive, whole person care.
We will reverse the damaging cuts to social care and build a social care system that enables independence and puts dignity and human rights at its heart.
Creating a healthy society
The aging population and increases in complex healthcare needs mean that we require a system that prioritises prevention of ill health and focuses on the whole person rather than a collection of reactive services that focus on treatment and cure.
That means rebuilding our public health system and placing it centre stage. The Health and Social Care Act ended public health as a responsibility of the NHS – as part of bringing our NHS back into public hands we would reintegrate public health as a responsibility of the NHS.
Staff are the service
Morale amongst NHS staff is at rock bottom after six years of chaos and delivering more for less. Staff have experienced real pay cuts – we will abolish the cap on public sector pay increases that has caused this.
We need to work with the health and social care workforce and their trade unions, properly rewarding them for their hard work and engaging with them about how to improve our services.
We will ensure that student bursaries for nursing and allied health professionals continue.
Through our commitment to security at work we will end the use of exploitative zero hours contracts, close the loopholes in the statutory minimum wage rates and lift the statutory minimum wage to the Living Wage.