LONDON (Reuters), Nov 2 - Health workers staged a lobby of parliament on Wednesday to campaign against job cuts and increasing private sector involvement in the National Health Service.
The rally, organized by an alliance of 16 unions and professional bodies under the banner NHS Together, brought doctors, nurses, and medical staff to Westminster from across England.
"NHS Together represents unity and a desire to stop the health service being fragmented -- broken up piece by piece," said Dave Prentis, general secretary of public sector union Unison.
"It makes no sense that critical services are outsourced. It makes no sense that services are controlled by unaccountable private healthcare companies," he told the rally.
Unions have praised the government for pouring record amounts of money into the health service.
But they say improvements this has brought are being undermined by recent moves to introduce a market-led system of treatment purchasing and provision, combined with a drive to eliminate spending deficits.
The Conservatives calculate that 20,000 jobs have been cut as a result of Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt's demand that hospitals balance their books by the end of the current financial year.
The government says most cutbacks are being met by posts not being filled and by staff redeployments.
It says there have only been 900 compulsory redundancies this year, compared to a rise of 300,000 staff across the NHS to 1.3 million since Labour came to power in 1997.
Prime Minister Tony Blair defended what he called "necessary change" in the NHS in the Commons on Wednesday.
"Of course there are changes in the health service taking place. Rightly, because there are more cases being done on a day case basis, there is new technology that is shortening waiting times ... there is more done in primary care settings now.
But health workers say changes to the NHS are damaging services to patients.
"It's getting pretty bad and it's probably going to get worse," Cristoph Lees of Doctors For Reform told BBC television.
"The problem is that there have been record funding increases to the NHS in the last few years.
"I don't think a year or two ago many people thought or knew that was going to end in cuts to services, wards closing and staff being made redundant."
A survey conducted for the Trades Union Congress found that half of those asked thought the NHS had got worse in the last 10 years.
Out of 2,022 voters questioned by YouGov, 52 percent said the NHS had got much worse or a little worse over the past decade.
Last Updated: 2006-11-01 9:00:20 -0400 (Reuters Health)
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