The NHS is a great British social institution that we all should be proud of. It belongs to the British people who pay for it and not to health tourists taking advantage of Soft Touch Britain.
We will:
- Fight for a public funded and provided health service free at the point of use
- Fill the current £8billion gap in the health service with part of the 12.5billion we save on foreign aid
- Stop ‘health tourism’
- Visitors to Britain will be required to have a valid, Government recognised health insurance policy before entry, just as British citizens must have when visiting other countries
- Bring hospital cleaning back in-house and make high cleanliness a top priority
- Scrap hospital parking charges
- Halt privatisation, the NHS will remain a cherished public-owned institution under a BNP Government
- Cut bureaucracy, not nurses’ jobs and hospitals
- Free GPs to see patients, not manage budget sheets
- Emphasis on prevention and early diagnosis
- For decades, the British National Health Service was looked upon by the rest of the world as one of the most successful state run health services in the world.
Today, it is a laughing stock. The NHS is critically ill. NHS Trusts are sacking staff, closing wards, cancelling operations and refusing patients vital life-saving drugs. Meanwhile, ‘health tourists’ are costing the NHS £2 billion a year, and diseases such as TB and AIDS are on the increase as a result of immigration.
British doctors and nurses are unable to find work in the NHS because we are importing medical staff (often with questionable qualifications) from the Third World where they are desperately needed.
Sixty percent of NHS staff are bureaucrats, and there are now more managers in the NHS than beds — with many earning more than £100,000 per year.
The contracting out of cleaning (often to contractors employing illegal immigrants) has resulted in collapsing standards of cleanliness, with around 20,000 patients a year dying of hospital-acquired infections.
“Marketisation,” and particularly the Conservative-created Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes imposed by Gordon Brown, has been a disaster which is saddling Trusts and the taxpayer with enormous debts. We totally reject this attempt to turn the nation’s health service into a private profit centre for giant corporations.
The British National Party has the only plan by which our NHS can be nursed back to health.
The BNP is wholly committed to a free, fully funded National Health Service for all British citizens.