Red Republic

Members of East Kilbride Scottish Socialist Party are involved in campaigning against the threat of privatisation of a local GP practice in the town.

Lanarkshire NHS Health Board have put one of the practices at Alison Lea Medical Centre out to tender in a process that could see private healthcare companies being brought into providing frontline services in the NHS.

Local SSP member and ex-MSP Carolyn Leckie commented, “how ironic in the month that sees the 60th anniversary of the NHS that Lanarkshire Health Board seem determined to undermine public control of our local health services. Having failed before in their attempts to hive off local surgeries elsewhere in Lanarkshire they are back to try again in East Kilbride. Privatisation of our health service will be a disaster, as it will mean that profit will come before patients and that flies in the face of the basic ethos of the NHS, which is about appropriate healthcare for all at the point of need. The Health Board must be made to see sense and make sure this creeping privatisation is stopped.”

Local campaigning, which involved the SSP, has previously stopped an earlier attempt by the health board to privatise a GP practice in Harthill in North Lanarkshire and a similar campaign will be needed to ensure the practice remains under NHS control.

Whilst an MSP, Carolyn raised concerns over links that individuals who once worked on the health board had with big private health providers like SERCO, who may again bid in East Kilbride, and sought to get the Scottish Parliament to agree to rule out the type of privatisation threatened at Alison Lea.

Carolyn added, “I was concerned that big health care corporations were looking at the potential profits from not just auxiliary services in the NHS but from front line services to patients and at that time were being given encouragement by the Labour Executive and the then health minister, East Kilbride MSP Andy Kerr. Those concerns remain with a health board that’s committed to privatisation, as Lanarkshire seems to be. Local people need to make their voices heard and the current administration could do worse than to look at the Bill for ‘Patients Not Profit’ that I laid in the last Parliament to stop this whole process in its tracks.”