Labour will damage your health

10.16.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Sat 16th Feb 2008

The centralising control-freak tendency of Labour's high command continues! Having failed to step in and redirect regional cash surpluses to the beleaguered Northumberland Healthcare Trust, thereby forcing local GPs to accept massive funding cuts which put patients at risk, Labour now wants to get rid of small medical practices and replace them with huge impersonal, factory-scale doctors' surgeries in the major population centres.

What Labour still doesn't understand is that in rural towns and communities, small medical practices have evolved over many years to deliver excellent levels of personal care and first class treatment to local patients - on an accessible, local basis. Labour's problem is that it wants to impose inappropriate inner-city solutions in a blinkered "one-size-fits-all" drive for uniformity.

These so-called "polyclinics" will force the closure of hundreds of smaller doctors surgeries and mean that people without transport in many Northumberland villages will find it impossible to access a doctor, leading to a major deterioration in medical care at the point of need.

One thing is abundantly clear; Northumberland needs New Labour like a hole in the head!

Related Link:

More of Andrew Duffield's 'Blog'.