NHS market liberalisation and the TTIP agreement

Abstract

Community nurses have perhaps more than most felt the effects of commissioning as services reduced to what is made explicit contractually. Commissioning was rolled out as the solution to the global financial crisis in 2007/8 that directly impacted on the cost of the NHS and at the time the mantra was to accept service re-configeration and be fit for commissioning purposes. We suggest, in contrast, successive governments' over the past thirty years have been less than candid about their true intentions to reform the NHS. Instead of reforms to improve productivity, quality and cost efficiency, the agenda had all along been to introduce the NHS to market liberalisation, along the same lines as the United States model of healthcare. This agenda aimed therefore to move the NHS from being publicly owned and the next stage is further market liberalisation of the NHS through the trans-Atlantic investment partnership. This means the public's health, once again, will be subordinate to the "rights" of corporate healthcare industries to profit from the NHS.