Ill and disabled bear the cost of privatisation
In August, NRS Healthcare suddenly went bust after announcing it had only days of cash left.
It was the NHS-contracted provider of all essential medical equipment and daily living aids in Oxfordshire, supplying hospital beds, mobility aids, hoists, and more. As I have just been discharged from hospital, this has directly affected me in recent weeks.
While a temporary replacement provider has been found (at the cost of an extra £1 million for the county council) a long-term solution remains up in the air.
Naturally, questions are being raised about how such an essential service was allowed to get into such a state in the first place.
But more pressing is the question of what are the thousands of people across the county, reliant on this medical equipment in order to be discharged from hospital and live independently, meant to do now?
The shortages of essential equipment being seen could take months to rectify, if they ever are at all.
After all, countless items that used to be provided on discharge by the NHS have already been cut back across the county to save costs: rehab tools, incontinence pads, over-bed tables – even hospital bed rails have become a restricted item!
The list goes on and on – and with no regard for the consequences on people’s quality of life. Rollator walkers, for example, have been classed ‘non-essential’, despite being a very common aid, key to people with even minor mobility needs being able to go to work, school, to the shops, or see friends and family.
Amidst this crisis, patients in Oxfordshire are now even being told that if the equipment costs less than £50, they will need to buy it themselves!
This when most people needing these daily living aids are elderly or reliant on PIP. It’s beyond outrageous.
Even if people can afford it, why should it be asked of them?
Essential services should never have been contracted out to profit-hungry companies. The ill and disabled should not be (literally!) left bearing the costs of a mess created by this piece-by-piece privatisation of the NHS.
BF, Oxford
Death while waiting three hours for an ambulance
Everyone knows that the NHS is crumbling, and has been for a while. But, perhaps if you need a reminder of the current state that it is in, here’s what I heard this week.
My boss’ neighbour had a heart attack. How long did it take for ambulances to arrive? Three hours, after they finally declared his critical condition a priority. But, by then, it was too late, and he died as help was finally on its way.
While I was undoubtedly shocked to hear this, it raised the question: is this really surprising, when the average ambulance waiting time for “urgent” calls is over three hours?
Because this, as we already knew, is the reality of the NHS, which has been torn to pieces by privatisation for multiple decades, where tens of billions of pounds is going straight into the pockets of greedy, profit-hungry, parasites.
This has led to a barely-functioning NHS, which is on the verge of collapse. In a system that is underfunded and understaffed beyond belief, the NHS is restricted to making a “Sophie’s Choice” decision as to what constitutes an emergency. And, in a capitalist-ruled health industry, a potentially fatal heart attack is low down on the list of urgency.
Make no mistake, this is down to capitalism. Private profits are allowed to benefit, while we have to pay for this crisis through austerity cuts. Unsurprisingly, the paramedics have fought back, where only this summer we saw 89 per cent of paramedics reject a frankly pathetic payment increase of 3.6 per cent. Even further, 95 per cent said they were willing to take action in order to oppose cuts to the NHS.
We need a programme to reverse funding cuts and privatisation, which will come through expropriating the bankers and billionaires, alongside full workers’ democracy in our health system.
Jack Webb, Oxford
Schools at breaking point
I have been working as a secondary school teacher for a few years and was excited this September to start a new school, which has a very good reputation.
I’ve been pleased to find that the senior leadership genuinely cares about teacher workload, with much better policies around marking, teacher autonomy, and parents’ evenings than my previous school.
Even so, I’ve been keeping track of my hours worked and it amounts to 45 hours per week, including breaktimes and lunchtimes as I work through these doing planning and paperwork. In half-term I spent 8 out of 9 days doing marking and planning (including weekends).
But the real victims of this system are the children who sit passively in a class of size 32 watching burned out, stressed, and underprepared teachers who cannot give them individual attention.
It is hard enough to learn the names of just over 200 students that I teach, let alone to give them all individual feedback or learn about their interests, talents and personalities.
Many of these children also aren’t getting the care they need at home because their parents also work gruelling jobs. It is heartbreaking every day to watch kids internalise this neglect and think that there is something wrong with them.
My job makes me determined to use every ounce of energy I have at the end of my working day to fight for communism. If I cannot provide the children I teach with the care and support that they need, then we can build a world fit for them to raise their kids in.
Adam Crawford, Leeds
The rot of austerity in SEMH schools
The crisis we see across society – from rising violence to mental health collapse – is mirrored inside the education system.
A friend who works in a Social, Emotional, and Mental Health (SEMH) school describes the effects austerity, social breakdown, and cuts to public services are having.
Low-paid workers are employed to triage the worst-behaving and most vulnerable students. They often fill gaps left by under-resourced classrooms, covering the needs of children least cared for, while the staff themselves are poorly paid and precariously employed – many living below the poverty line.
There are now many children being home-schooled, especially neurodiverse students and families able to work from home. Some attend academies or state-run schools that operate more like businesses than communities, with different resources and approaches. Families with more means or knowledge can navigate these systems, while working-class families often cannot.
Some students pass through our school only to be excluded again. If their needs were met by services – and not by producing documents listing needs (enforceable only by the most knowledgeable parents) and planning against worsening, but employing enough staff to meet them – outcomes would improve.
Every school I’ve worked in is understaffed and overworked; it is a miracle to survive, let alone provide care. As a teacher, I see documents and realise what isn’t in place and feel unsupported, unable to resource Education, Health and Care Plans properly.
Having to self-care in excess of what is tolerable explains why many teachers quit. Expensive consultants with no skin in the game are brought in to prepare schools for inspections, while staffing budgets are cut and agency contracts not renewed — and the consultants move on.
This week, a distressed child physically lashed out, struck a staff member, and bit me while we tried to hold him safely. Staff are physically and emotionally overwhelmed, injured and blamed.
The system maintains the appearance of inclusion on paper, while children with different needs are repeatedly excluded in practice. It is a microcosm of capitalist crisis: profit-seeking, bureaucracy, and managerialism displace real care. Education for children with different needs becomes about containment, not development.
Ben Bickford, Peckham
Waitrose steals wages from autistic man
The BBC recently published a feel-good story about ASDA offering a paid position to a woman’s autistic son, after he lost his job at Waitrose. The article neglects to highlight that he had worked over 600 hours unpaid for Waitrose over four years.
Waitrose never paid a penny for his work, because they classed it as “work experience”. Waitrose’s website lists shop assistant roles being paid £12.40 an hour, so we can estimate that Tom has been robbed of about £7,500 in unpaid wages. In contrast, Waitrose’s revenue in 2024 was £7.7 billion.
When they asked the management for just a few paid hours – not even full compensation for his years of work – Waitrose claimed he was not able to do the job because he has autism (!) and subsequently sacked him from his voluntary role too.
Apparently, working over 600 hours is not enough experience to get a paid job. Only after this story made national news did Asda (keen to profit from some good publicity, no doubt) offer the man a paid position of ten hours a week.
There is no low the capitalists won’t sink to in their pursuit of profits. This man’s story is tragically not unique. In 2019, five million people across Britain were made to work two billion hours of unpaid overtime, which amounts to £35 billion in wage theft.
There is only one group in society who should go uncompensated: the bosses!
Nottingham reader
“We all have a responsibility”
At Labour’s conference, Starmer responded to critics using the term “broken Britain” to describe the government’s countless failures in healthcare, education, the economy, and so on.
After rattling off a number of irrelevant things that have had no noticeable effect on our lives, he then listed off some examples of ordinary British people who prove that Britain is not broken through their acts of kindness.
He mentioned one person who recycles school uniforms for struggling parents, or another person who raised money to rebuild a library. He also spoke of others who cleaned up racist graffiti and the rubble that littered the streets after the Southport riots.
In other words, they’re cleaning up the mess created by Starmer and his system in the first place!
Starmer went on to say that “we all have a responsibility to change our country” – conveniently shifting the burden for fixing Britain onto the shoulders of ordinary people.
But it’s not our job to dutifully correct the government’s mistakes. We can build a better Britain ourselves, without the need for politicians and billionaires.
Dylan O’Connor, Leeds
