Manchester mental healthcare in crisis as NHS trust axed and vital services cut
This is abominable.
Looking at the reasons for the crisis, let’s all note “cuts to NHS funding”. We have been told – time and time again – that the Conservatives have increased funding to the NHS. In that case, where is it?
See also the fact that support for people with chronic fatigue is to be axed. It’s probably just a coincidence that this is happening as Oxford University publishes dodgy research claiming that chronic fatigue isn’t what we all thought it was, but notice that care for people with this condition is the first thing to go.
Finally: The increased risk of suicide. There is already concern about the number of benefit claimants being driven to take their own lives due to the callous behaviour of the Department for Work and Pensions. Now another lifeline is being withdrawn.
Manchester is not the only health trust in crisis. Where it goes, will others follow?
What will be the consequences for patients?
And will government ministers be bothered about it in the slightest?
Manchester’s mental health trust is to be axed as it faces a catastrophic £7m funding black hole.
A new round of £1.5m worth of cuts will hit more than 650 patients, sparking a warning that people could be driven to suicide.
Manchester Health and Social Care Trust’s finances are now so bad that the trust is to be abolished. NHS bosses will decide in the coming days what to replace it with.
Support for people with chronic fatigue, affective disorders and sexual problems will all go in the latest cuts. Community therapy through gardening and carpentry, which many patients say they rely on to stay off medication, is also being axed.
The trust has had to make £7m worth of cuts. It says it has already made £3m in savings, but will now have to find another £4m, including the latest cuts.
It blames a range of factors including £2m in redundancy costs due to council cuts, high spending on private beds due to shortages in NHS spaces, and cuts to NHS funding.
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They starting to do that my way too, there is already a 2 year waiting list so I guess closures will follow.
It’s disgusting and it makes me so angry I could scream profanities.
Surely even the people who voted Conservàtive must be starting to have a rethink now. This Government will go down in history for all the wrong reasons!
Meanwhile Personal Health Budgets and some of the questionable payouts and costs they incur still trundle along in the background confusing the hell out of everyone internally and externally who have to suffer much more radical cutbacks and knock-on issues.
Does that Oxford University report have the dirty fingermarks of Unum together with its acolytes? Bear in mind Cameron’s constituency is in Oxford.
Axed because it was underfunded? This is astonishing. It is akin to a business deciding to just give in because there was a lull in business. The assumption is that it can legitimately just stop operating and all will be fine. Mental health is the great elephant in society – the acutely undervoiced problem that undermines societal health. The Tory MPs are rich and healthy and are sorted for life, but look at the trail of devastation they are hell bent on leaving as their legacy. Their wealth so seriously distorts their humanity that they might as well be classified amongst the psychopaths of this world, although I suspect Iain Duncan Smith is already amongst their number.
Chronic fatigue syndrome now has a clear pathology from what I read recently. The massive and real shortages of energy its victims report is too extreme to be purely psychological or there would be big swings as their mood changes.