About us

Although we have been primarily involved in the campaign to keep services at Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal, we are a group that aims to challenge the current political realities that are undermining our Health Service nationally. We recognise that the problems our own services are facing locally are in fact being replicated across the country, and therefore we are keen to be involved in, or supportive of, other local campaigns.

The fight to save our NHS is in some respects a political one. We are critical of some of the

target driven and pro-market policies of both the current and previous government which we consider to be destructive to the ethos of a public NHS. We believe a political problem requires political solutions, which is why we are promoting alternative political 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 promote and campaign for a public and genuinely national health service where need is prioritised above political and financial concerns. To this end we will work with people of all political persuasions and of none.

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.  The current NHS crisis is in many respects a product of an obsession with targets: targets which distort clinical need. Targets 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. For example, the "payment by results" system has resulted in NHS hospitals being run as businesses whereby they are paid for the amount of work they do and are able to make more money by keeping costs down. The result is that, in many areas, many unlucrative services are being cut to make way for elective surgery, and costs are being cut at the expense of staff.

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".

No Privatisation - No unnecessary cuts - Patients before finances