‘Scrap the reforms’ says RCM

It has consistently voiced concerns about the Health and Social Care Bill and believes the Tory-led coalition has failed to address key concerns.

The move comes as the RCN also calls for the bill to be shelved and just days after a poll by the RCGP found that 98% of GP respondents support its withdrawal.

While in December the BMA voiced vehement opposition to the bill, which is currently making its way through parliament.      

Cathy Warwick, RCM chief executive, has branded the bill a ‘massively expensive distraction’ from the NHS challenges to improve healthcare at a time of severe spending restraint.
 
‘The RCM supports many of the government’s aspirations for the NHS, such as clinically-led commissioning, greater engagement of service users in their care and more integrated services, but the fact of the matter is that these can all be achieved without the need for this divisive and costly bill,’ she said.
 
‘The government has failed to present sufficient evidence that its proposals are necessary. They have failed to present evidence that the upheaval will result in an improvement in services to the people of England.

‘And, they have failed to answer the concerns of the people who fear for the future of the NHS under these plans.
 
‘Breaking up what we have, embracing the private sector, and injecting full-blown competition and market forces is not what the NHS needs or what health professionals and patients want.
 
‘We join the growing chorus of voices calling for the bill to be withdrawn, and the proposed reforms stopped in their entirety.’

She also said independent analysts have calculated that implementing the provisions in the bill will cost the NHS an extra £2-3billion.

This is on top of the £20billion in efficiency savings that the NHS has to find over the next four years.

The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, is still fighting to get the government to abandon their reforms and said 'even the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives say that it is more dangerous to press on with reorganisation than to stop it.'

'The government really needs to listen and put the NHS first and drop the bill,' he added.

The Department of Health has maintained that it will ‘continue to work with everyone in the NHS to make the improvements that are necessary to improve care for patients’.

While health secretary Andrew Lansley claims that the bill enables the NHS to deliver efficiency savings and improve performance.

He said: ‘It takes about £1.5billion a year out of NHS administration costs because it reduces that superstructure of bureaucracy in the NHS.’

He added that over the course of this parliament, he believes it will deliver over £4billion savings.