What next for the NHS campaign?

Last week, the NHS started to change. The laws which the government pushed through last year came into force. The changes would probably be even more alarming if it wasn’t for all the campaigning we’ve done together. But it’s all still pretty worrying.

With the changes now in force, we need to decide what we want to do next. What’s the priority? How can we best work together to defend the idea of a decent public health service we can rely on to look after us when we need it?

You can help us decide where the NHS campaign goes next. Please take two minutes to vote in a poll.

When the government finally got its changes through last year, 38 Degrees members were disappointed. But we voted to keep the campaign going. And since then, by working together, we’ve made a huge difference:

• Thousands of 38 Degrees members across the country have asked their local GPs to put patients first and keep the NHS public. We’ve already signed up groups of local GPs in the Midlands, south-west and London.
• We moved fast when we heard that the government was looking at a new tax dodge for the private health industry. Thousands of us wrote in to complain. The plan was dropped within hours!
• There’s been big problems with privatised GP out-of-hours care in places like Cornwall. So hundreds of thousands of us demanded an investigation into what happened there. An inquiry has now been launched by the influential Public Accounts Committee of MPs.
• Just last month, the government announced new rules which could force GPs to hand almost all health contracts to private companies. Over 350,000 of us signed the petition and wrote to our MPs. This helped force the government to withdraw the rules – a big win, though there’s still more to do.

It works because we all work together. So please help decide what we do next by taking the poll.

Should we be focusing on protecting the NHS from budget cuts? Stopping further privatisation? Supporting local campaigns like those against hospital closures? Or making sure that when managers fail to protect patient care, like in Mid Staffs, they’re held properly responsible?

We can do a lot, but we can’t do everything. So please vote!