[FIGHTING THE CUTS .. in London GUTS CAUSE…]

Scan page 5

FIGHTING THE CUTS .. in London GUTS CAUSE CASUALT! LONDON DIVISION NUPE SI AYS:

MITC Oxfordshire AHA, with the support of local consultants and the Community Health Council have renewed their attempts to close the vitally necessary long-stay Longworth Hospital for 50 highly dependant elderly women.

There is a critical shortage of well over 300 beds for the elderly in Oxfordshire, admitted by the AHA.

They have just closed the geriatric hospital in Cowley Road, which they argue was not a cut but a straight transfer of beds.

In fact, 13 beds have been lost as well as specialist geriatric care received there.

The closure of Cowley Road Hospital met with great public hostility, but crucial though this community support for the hospital was, it was only the hospital staff who were in a position to defend it.

It soon became clear, however, that the official line of NUPE-the major union at the hospital-was not to fight to save the hospital, but instead to organise for "the best transfer terms for staff" when closure took place.

When the support committee for Cowley Road was set up, therefore, it did not receive the fullest participation by the union leaders in the hospital.

In fact the NUPE senior steward Betty Ward-a NUPE national executive membertook every opportunity to attack it.

Without a fighting leadership within the hospital, the workers. there became demoralised and insecure about carrying out an effective fight The savagery of the Tories' cuts in the heatlh service are being seen in all their gory detail in London.

At the end of September there was the closure of St. Benedict's geriatric hospital in Tooting, despite heroic resistance by hospital staff.

Now another struggle has emerged at St. Columba's Hospital in Hampstead. Woman Worker has often commented on the way the cuts hit the weakest first, but the attack on St. Columba's is the most graphic example yet.

Patients It's a hospital for terminally ill cancer patients which the Area Health Authority decided over a year ago should close.

Local trade unionists and staff resisted the plan, with the result that the AHA chose a simple method of running the hospital down: just wait while the patients die off one by one.

So the remaining patients have had to contend not only with their own terminal illness, but with the grim atmosphere of a hospital emptying around them. to save the hospital.

The hospital closed, the beds were lost and Betty Ward became full time convenor at the brand new multi-million pound John Radcliffe Hospital.

Fortunately the story at Longworth is very different.

It was in May 1978 that the staff were all gathered together for a mass meeting to be told by an AHA officer that theirhospital would close.

"Use your union to get jobs at the new Witney hospital" he said.

Fortunately the union steward at Longworth Hospital had other ideas about what a union was for.

She called a meeting for all union members in the hospital and asked them to oppose the closure when the time came by continuing to work with the patients and keeping all the hospital's facilities open.

To succeed, she said, they would have to seek the support of all the NHS trade unions locally, especially from their own union branch, COHSE.

The site meeting voted unanimously to continue working with their patients in the wards, to go into occupation to prevent bed removal and to ask for supporting strike action when the AHA moves in to physically close it.

It is clear that the AHA and the consultants see geriatric facilities in general and Longworth in particular as a soft option for closure.

Woman Worker supporters are fighting to ensure that the COHSE workers' action with supporting strike action from other health service unions will prove them wrong and keep this much needed hospital open.

However, at the beginning of October, local administrators decided that the patients weren't dying fast enough, so they announced that the remaining eight would be moved and the hospital closed publicly When a local consultant opposed the move, he was sacked.

Hospital staff, with official support from NUPE, have been picketing the gates to prevent the move, and have been supported by ambulance drivers. The feeling against the closure is so strong that even private ambulance firms (which moved patients at St. Benedict's) have refused to become involved, and the AHA resorted to minicabs to remove three patients.

The St. Columba's workers need all the support they can get to be assured of victory.

They need support on the picket line (every day, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the hospital, Spaniards Lane, London N.W.3).

But more importantly, they need strike action throughout the public sector in London. Members of NUPE and other public sector unions should be pressing their leadership to call strike action immediately.

----- pull-quotes -----

TRIAL ITION LONGWORTIT OPEN! UHS trade union