Day: March 9, 2024

UK News: Campaigners say health service can’t provide care quickly because of underinvestment, which is allowing firms to ‘make a killing’

* Private healthcare could become ‘a new normal’ as NHS grows weaker
* ‘My GP suggested it’: Britons explain why they went private for surgery

Private hospitals are doing one in 10 of all planned NHS operations amid patients’ frustration at long delays for NHS care and political pressure to cut waiting times.

The new figures seen by the Guardian prompted campaigners to warn that the NHS is “allowing the private sector to make a killing” and is seeing more and more of its services “cannibalised” because years of underinvestment mean it can no longer provide care quickly. Continue reading…
http://dlvr.it/T3rgMs

Shadow cabinet talk with Whitehall officials after Keir Starmer meets head of civil service

All members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet are to meet top civil servants in Whitehall departments before Easter as Labour steps up preparations to form the next government, according to senior party sources.

The Observer has been told that Starmer recently held a first round of so-called “access talks” with the cabinet secretary Simon Case, the head of the civil service, at a “neutral venue” in London, to kick off an exchange of information between the official opposition and Whitehall in advance of a potential handover of power. Continue reading…
http://dlvr.it/T3rfx2