Belfast Health Trust report: under-resourced home care to replace rehabilitation unit

The Belfast Health Trust has claimed that the slashing of two-thirds of rehabilitation beds housed in the Elliot Dynes unit will be absorbed by community-based services. However, the Socialist Party has come into possession of a study entitled ‘Review of Patients in Elliot Dynes Rehabilitation Unit, Royal Victoria Hospital- December 2009’. This review highlights the fact that a number of people became inpatients at the unit unnecessarily because these same community services, which would have been more appropriate, simply did not have the resources for them! Thus, without a huge increase in funding for these services, which the Trust management has failed to demonstrate any evidence of, the loss of beds at Elliot Dynes will be a drastic cut which will effect some of the most vulnerable in our society.

We held a picket of the Trust’s Executive Board on 25th March at Knockbracken Health Care Park. The venue was changed at the last minute, obviously to undermine our protest. I delivered a petition against health cuts and privatisation to William McKee, the trust’s Chief Executive. He tried to deny responsibility for the cuts. He is correct that the Trust’s budget is determined the Assembly Executive. All the main parties are complicit in the cuts. However, he has simply managed and rubber-stamped these cuts, displaying more concern for his £125,000 salary than the health service.

Councillor Tom Hartley, who is meant to represent the public’s interests, was present but did not come out to greet our delegation. He still refuses to explain why he has failed to speak out against these cuts, why people should accept them. Is this because of the £15,453 he received from the Trust from April 2007 to April 2009, and the £5-10k he will have received since then?

Total
0
Shares
Previous Article

Russia - Terror returns to Moscow

Next Article

Public sector agreement an historic sell-out!

Related Posts

Time to plan for all-out postal strike

 Editorial, The Socialist (Socialist Party England & Wales)

The third week of national strike action at Royal Mail has seen the bosses on the run. They fear the disruption of mail in the pre-Christmas period when over two billion letters, cards and parcels are processed through the system.

They thought they could force the union into making more concessions just as they did in the 2007 deal, which many postal workers (and how right they were) feared was the thin edge of the wedge. The plans of Royal Mail to cut jobs, intensify workloads and drive working conditions back into the Victorian age have been completely exposed by their actions since the 2007 deal.

NI General Election – Fall of the Robinson Dynasty

Socialist alternative needed

The general election results in Northern Ireland will be mostly remembered for the punishment the voters of East Belfast meted out to DUP leader and Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson who spectacularly lost the seat he had held for 31 years.

 

Sammy Wilson bans climate change!!

IT DOES not come as much of a surprise to most people in Northern Ireland to hear that, yet again, the Assembly has managed to make a monumental mess of things. But the decision of Environment Minister Sammy Wilson to ban the broadcasting of a government TV ad encouraging people to switch off electrical appliances when not in use in order to save energy has left even the most hardened political cynics open-mouthed.

News stations around the world have broadcast the story in disbelief. Wilson’s reason for this unprecedented move was that the ad was just more “insidious New Labour propaganda” about the impact of climate change. Incredibly, Wilson has said that the world-wide “uninformed hysteria” surrounding the issue was “a con” which had been launched into without examining the “science and implications”. Yet he ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming and virtually universal acceptance that emergency action is urgently required to prevent a major environmental crisis.

Cutting medical secretaries causes X-ray backlog

Recent reports have uncovered a massive backlog of thousands of untyped x-ray reports in the Mater Hospital. This gives us a glimpse of what the cuts planned by the Belfast Health Trust management and the Assembly Executive will mean. The backlog was caused by a lack of medical secretaries to process the reports. Ridiculously, the Belfast Trust has threatened to slash 50 more of these workers, while cutting the pay of another 120!