About us

Although we began life as a keep services at Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal, we are a group that aims to lobby for improvement in the Health Service - both locally and nationally. We believe in the ethos of the NHS: that care should be free at the point of need. We also believe that care services should continue to adapt and evolve to fit best practice and the changing needs of communities. However, we always believe such change should be in the interests of patients, their families and broader society.

The campaign to improve the NHS is in some respects a political one. For two years we operated as a political party, under the name "Save our NHS Group". We stood candidates at local and parliamentary level. However, the group's aims have always been broader than the party political and, as many campaigns to "save" local NHS services came to an end, the group decided to adjust its focus from protecting services to promoting a better NHS. Thus we ceased operating as a political entity and renamed ourselves the NHS Improvment Society.

During the last few years, we have often been critical of some of the target driven and pro-market policies of both the current and previous governments, which we considered to be destructive to the ethos of a public NHS. We believe a political problem requires political solutions, which is why we have always looked to work with politicians of all parties to promote alternative ideas for the future of our NHS in which the service remains entirely within the public sector and is run entirely with the public interest in mind.

However, in spite of our criticisms, we are NOT an anti-government group. Our objective is to lobby for continued improvement of the NHS. To this end we will work with people of all political persuasions and of none. Similarly, while we share many of the aims of organisations such as Keep our NHS Public, our objectives are wider than being merely an anti-privatisation campaign.

On a national level we advocate:

An end to the private finance initiative (PFI) - the economically unsound arrangement whereby private companies invest in new hospitals and lease them back to the NHS for a period of time, making huge returns at the expense of the taxpayer in the process. For more information about PFI, and its effects, please click here to visit the UNISON website.

An end to a health culture where targets are prioritised above patient care.  Targets which distort clinical need. They result in staff and patients not being treated with dignity, the compromised control of health managers in delivering effective care and the erosion of the NHS's ethos.

A unified rather than fragmented NHS. The NHS is a National health service. It should not be a loose conglomerate of local Trusts which compete with and against each other financially. This absurd situation has been engineered by the gradual privatisation of more and more services. We would like to see fewer layers of bureaucracy, an end to the policies which see parts of the same service in direct competition with each other and greater public accountability. We think the NHS should be run as a cohesive organisation which would end the so-called "postcode lottery".