Trade union inquiry probes geriatric care

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Demonstrators fight to save Cowley Road Hospital.

SUBSCRIBE HIEK'T BUNDEO D to Socialist Press Please send me trial sub/six months/one year wage control, cuts A report produced by a trade union inquiry in Oxford has come out in strong condemnation of the proposed closure of Cowley Road geriatric hospital.

• The inquiry was set up by four trade union bodies in the county, including the Oxford Trades Council and the Joint Trade Union Committee of health service unions.

It has produced a report which has published for the first time the views of the workers at the hospital and exposed the lie which had been manufactured by NUPE officials that the workers were in favou of closure.

Beginnings

At the same time it has shown the beginnings of what could be achieved by full scale inquiries of health workers in exposing the misplanning and the profiteering in the health service.

The Oxford inquiry is not a full scale workers inquiry. It has not 'opened the books' of the health authority. But it has, by going directly to the workers concerned, pointed the way towards doing so.

A historical introduction to the report shows how care of the elderly grew at first out of the poor laws and Victorian 'philanthropy. . The Cowley Road Hospital itself was at one time an old workhouse.

The Tory government is of course seeking to destroy the NHS and replace it with an updated version of such minimal care for the working class.

As the report states:

"The enormous gain of the National Health Service, won by the labour movement after 150 years of struggle, has survived the deprivations of successive post war governments wracked by the crises of post war capitalism.

"Both by direct cuts, redistribution' of resources and the encouragement of the inflationary erosion of real resources, the state's committment •to' the provision of health care has been progressively reduced.

«Westminster politicians have been attempting to build up 'traditional' family values of each looking after their own, to force the burden of care back into the home."

The report looks at population forecasts, which show that the numbers of over 65s and in particular over 75s will grow dramatically over the next ten years.

In 1978 the Oxfordshire Area Health Authority fell short of the DHSS standards for the numbers of hospital beds for the elderly by 127. Using official government forecasts on population, this shortfall will rise to 374 by 1978.

The AHA has presented the proposed closure of the hospital as a 'level transfer' as part of opening the new multi-million pound John Radcliffe Hospital. They deny that the closure of the hospital is a cut.

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But the report exposes this as a lie. The number of beds earmarked for geriatric patients in the new hospital has been fudged through a system of double counting and those elderly who were previously in general wards and not counted as occupying 'geriatric beds' have now been counted in to the new total.

Staff at Cowley Road Hospital have concentrated on the question of patient care.

They are acutely aware that the existing building is inadequate and in need of substantial improvement.

But they also recognise that the specialist nursing of geriatrics is to be split up and that far more geriatric patients will be put into Health Secretary Vaughan general wards.

On general wards geriatric patients nave ic 'compete' for attention with younger patients, who may have clinically more 'interesting' cases.

Hard-pressed nurses (the new hospital is 60 nurses short of requirements) have no time for the constant turning and changing that totally dependent geriatrics need.

But most of all the report points to the way that at a time of desperate need the authority can consider closing a highly successful and cheap hospital and pretend that it is not a cut.

The hospital is in a local community which itself has high number of old people. It is convenient for visitors and on the best bus route in the city.

"Confidence in the will or the ability of the AHA to plan a health service based on need is at an all time low.

"The closure of Cowley Road Hospital is first and foremost an act of expediency.

"It might coincide with some long term plan tor geriatric care in the county, but since no such plan exists, it is certainly not part of one.

"Once the hospital is closed there will be no turning back and there will be no compensating improvements in the service."

This report, based on the trade union movement and directed into the organised and unorganised workers in the hospital is a valuable tool in a fight to save the hospital.

It was excluded from proposing policies and is therefore completely inadequate in itself as a means of defending the hospital.

It does however provide a basis from which a campaign for policies of occupation and supporting strikes can be launched.

«Cowley Road HospitalThe Case Against Closure" is available from P. Ward, Secretary, Trades Union Oxford and District Council, Bedlam, Trading Estate, Old Road , Headington, Oxford, price 10p plus postage.

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