MP calls for parliamentary support of St Helier (From Wimbledon Guardian)

Tom Brake voted to increase the UK payment to the IMF to prop up the Euro, from £10 Billion to £20 Billion. The £20 Billion thrown away on the Euro by our MPs is 526 times their budget cut for St Helier.
Tom Brake’s Conservative/Lib Dem coalition has cut St Helier’s budget by £38 million. Last year being in the EU cost the UK economy nearly £15,000,000 every hour of the day! 1 minute in the EU costs the same as the annual salaries of
10 nurses !

Both our Sutton MPs also voted with Nick Clegg to support his unnecessary, unmandated, and almost universally opposed NHS privatisation Act. Early Day Motions are a parliamentary device to draw attention to a matter and usually have little chance of success. It won't in itself do anything for St. Helier.

When you look at the publicly available CV information on the CEO picked for the job at St. Helier with the references to cutting costs, changing structures, externalisations, and mergers, the layman could be forgiven for thinking that the plan to downgrade services at St. Helier was cut and dried a long time ago.
http://uk.linkedin.c
om/pub/matthew-hopki
ns/17/7a6/799

Mr Brake has been a keen supporter of this coalition, backing every regressive, short sighted and damaging move they have made. He can't be surprised when Cameron's wrecking ball visits his own constituency. The voters won't forget what he has done.

The moves to reduce the facilities at St. Helier Hospital and shoehorn them into St. George's Hospital Tooting must be viewed in the light of PM Cameron's rule change that hospitals including St. George's are allowed to devote up to half their facilities to private patients to raise revenue and be more self-governing. So thousands of extra patients from Sutton, Carshalton and Morden will be banging on the doors of St. George's joining the existing queues and the beds and services will be inadequate and waits will increase. Then we'll find we are offered the treatment we would expect on a private basis with a nice bill to follow despite our already having paid in through our taxes and National Insurance.
Make no mistake the tinkering with CaMoron's NHS Act won't stop his privatisation. These changes must be resisted at this late stage by the people who value our public NHS and in particular our cherished local St, Helier NHS District General Hospital. A few people have said they won't defend St. Helier Hospital because they have previously had a bad experience there. You don't shut a hospital because someone had a problem some time ago in one of the departments with one of the staff. You complain constructively and that is the way standards are defended. I'm sure St. George's will have given some patients a bad experience too. Currently a friend is waiting for a heart valve repair at Bees Knees St. George's and it keeps being postponed through emergencies. As services are concentrated and beds cut this will be the norm again to increase the pressure to vote with your feet for Dave's Private Americanised Care System feeding the medical insurance companies fat cats in their stripy suits.

I keep reading about plans to shut St Helier. Then I read the proposals and there is no plan to shut St Helier, just a proposal to reshuffle services across four hospitals, which local doctors believe will save lives. There's a lot of irresponsible flag-waving going on, not least by Mr Brake and his colleagues.

I keep reading about plans to shut St Helier. Then I read the proposals and there is no plan to shut St Helier, just a proposal to reshuffle services across four hospitals, which local doctors believe will save lives. There's a lot of irresponsible flag-waving going on, not least by Mr Brake and his colleagues.