This year’s UNISON health conference offers “a chance to move forward, to set the course for a future we all want to see for health staff and for the NHS,” health group chair Roz Norman told delegates as she welcomed them to conference in Liverpool this morning.
The union has notched up successes in the past year, she noted, including:
- resisting the £75m privatisation plan in Cornwall;
- ensuring that older people’s services remain in the NHS in Cambridgeshire;
- and similar anti-privatisation successes in Weston, Dorset and West Sussex.
These and many more, she said, were “victories won by our members, by their hard work and dedication, refusing to cave in to the privateers and their government sponsors”.
But, she added, “of course, strike action on pay is now something that the majority of us in this hall have experienced in the past year.”
And she had particularly warm words of congratulation for the Doncaster Care UK workers who had won their long-running dispute.
But the government has now set its sights on healthworkers’ unsocial hours payments, and conference needs “to send out a very clear message to this or any future government: UNISON will not stand by and let this happen.”
And she highlighted the stress suffered by health workers – and ambulance workers in partiular, as revealed in last week’s UNISON survey.
Ms Norman noted that “privatisation is an increasingly real phenomenon for more and more of our members” and we have an “NHS on the brink”.
But, in a matter of weeks, “we have a chance to change this” in an election that comes “at a crucial time for our union and at a time when the NHS is never out of the headlines” – and we can all play our part.