Chippenham - Save Our Beds

Save our beds

By Laura Williams

AN action group of patients, doctors and councillors has been formed to stop hospital beds being closed in Chippenham.

GPs fear newly appointed neighbourhood teams are already unable to cope and the situation will get worse when beds are reduced from 43 to ten.

A public meeting is to be held at Chippenham Town Hall on March 1 or 8 .

Dr Nick Brown, a GP at Chippenham’s Rowden Surgery, said that sections of the neighbourhood teams are not taking new referrals and so beds are being blocked in the hospital.

North Wiltshire MP James Gray said: “I am going to try and persuade the government that these are cuts too far and will result in a worsening of health care in the area.”

A letter highlighting fears has been drafted and Dr Brown wants as many people as possible to send it to Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Health.

It reads: “It is clear that local NHS managers, in their rush to meet financial and political targets, are completely disregarding the views of the local people, practice based commissioners and clinicians.”

Dr Robert Muir, a GP at Chippenham’s Lodge Surgery, said: “I’m extremely concerned about the future with the loss of beds. The neighbourhood teams, as hard as they try, will struggle to cope.”

Gladys Ferris’s husband Granville, 82, who suffers from Crohn’s Disease is a patient at Chippenham Hospital. She is worried about the care he will get when discharged.

She said: “We had several different neighbourhood teams come to help us but it was all so confusing.

One day we’d get a couple of nurses and the next none at all. And of course, there was no help through the night.”

A spokesman for Carers Support said: “The impact of all of this on the carers is colossal. The biggest problem is that the neighbourhood teams were promised to provide 24/7 care, but there are big chunks when this does not happen.”

Chippenham Hospital League of Friends representative Elizabeth Sexton said: “We would like to see the beds stay open because they are desperately needed.”

UNISON representative Roger Davey said: “There’s stress on the neighbourhood teams and staff morale is low.”

A spokesman for Wiltshire PCT said: “Patient care is our absolute priority. There is no evidence to suggest that Neighbourhood Teams have refused any appropriate referral. Patients will only be discharged when they are fit to be discharged, and when arrangements are in place for care at home.”

NUT members ballot for strike action

Swindon Advertiser
By Avantika Bhargava

A THOUSAND teachers could walk out of the town’s schools if a proposed strike gets the go ahead.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will ballot members to strike against the continued cutting of teachers’ living standards.

And teachers in Swindon are getting the worst deal, according to union leaders.

NUT members in all of Swindon’s primary and secondary schools will be balloted at the end of the month about a one-day strike on April 24.

The last time teachers in the town went ahead with major strike action was 22 years ago.

Andy Woolley, the NUT’s south west regional secretary, said: “This is the third year running that the pay rise for teachers has been below inflation and this amount is likely to be the same for the next two years.

“Swindon is the worst hit in the south west region because of the high cost of living and so young teachers are constantly finding it difficult to get onto the property ladder.”

Peter Smith, the NUT’s Swindon representative, feels teachers earn less than the average graduate after leaving university.

He said: “They spend four years at university with no pay, and also have a building student debt and when they start they earn just over £20,000 - that’s about £3,000 less than your average graduate. This gap widens over the next two years and within five years of joining the profession.

“Fifty per cent of young teachers leave because of heavy workload and pay conditions.

“The Government had promised us that if inflation continued to rise they would review our pay, but they have gone back on their word.”

According to figures from the NUT, junior doctors who earn a basic salary with a supplement would earn £32,087 with the amount increasing to over £39,000.

Police officers also earn a higher wage than teachers and are paid during training and don’t need to be graduates.

Suspension Trauma Petition

Health & Safety reps from the Gloucester & North Wilts branch of the CWU (covering BT) attended the Health & Safety conference organised by Swindon TUC on February 4th. In the discussion they drew to our attention that the branch has launched a petition on the Downing Street website. It reads:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to amend The Work at Height Regulations 2005 to make it law for explanatory labels to be permanently fixed to all fall arrest lanyards and safety harnesses, so rescuers understand the implications of “Suspension Trauma”.”

They explain that:

“It is possible that an otherwise fit person, saved from falling by a lanyard fall arrest system, can suffer from suspension trauma within 10 - 30 minutes while awaiting rescue. Blood can pool in the legs causing the person to slip in to unconsciousness. Most would be rescuers are not trained in suspension trauma and their normal treatment for someone who has fainted could lead to the patient’s rapid death. Labels should be permanently affixed to all safety harnesses and lanyards explaining that the patient should be treated for a “Crush injury” to prevent re-flow. They must be kept in a sitting position for at least half an hour to avoid a heart attack or severe kidney damage. This simple label could save lives, please sign this petition.”

BT engineers, of course, have to climb polls to work on lines, often working on their own.

Les Glover who originated the petition explains why.

“Suspension trauma really crept into my life in a slow unassuming way. Quite a few years ago we were trained on the use of a new harness at work to replace our old faithful safety belt that we had grown used to when climbing telephone poles.

The new harness was a pain, buckle at the chest, buckle at the waist and buckles on each thigh, then this damn lanyard connected to a ‘D’ ring on the chest. The lanyard was always getting in the way but we had to use it. The training had a very quick 2 minutes on what we had to do if we fell from the pole. The lanyard would break then completely arrest the fall to leave us suspended.

Just get back on to the pole steps we were told, if you cannot, wriggle your toes or keep your legs moving. We treated it as a bit of a joke to be truthful. the seriousness was never put across to us, I would hate to say by design so it must of been by ignorance. After that we just got on and used the new harness and lanyard (well most of us anyway).

A year or so later I heard a news item on the radio during the night when I had trouble sleeping, it concerned some rescue training where someone in a harness was in the process of helping train others to rescue him. He was uninjured and fit but he slipped in to unconsciousness. At the time I thought “Must bring this up at work” but by the time morning came I had slept for a few hours and the memory as gone.

Gone for about 3 years until I was attending a CWU safety reps course at our own union training school, Alvescott. We had just had a guest speaker, a nice guy but not really the best of speakers, he had stepped in at the last moment when the first choice was called away.

After he had left we were having an informal discussion about hazards when the memory of that radio news item came to me so I mentioned it. “Suspension Trauma” someone said and then proceeded to tell us a little more about it and how his branch had been trying to raise the issue with BT for sometime. That prompted me to go to the library after our evening meal and do a bit of googleing, what I learned that night frightened me, the fact that it was so little understood and so deadly when mishandled. Why weren’t we told more about it at work? Why were emergency services relatively ignorant of it.

I decided that this was something I could and should do something about. I had spent quite a time reading the Work at height regulation 2005 and thought that an amendment so an information tag to be fitted to harnesses and lanyards would be a good but simple way of alerting rescuers that special treatment would be required. Hence the birth of the petition.Later I made enquiries with the Great Western Ambulance service and eventually got to talk to one of their trainers, responsible for the training of paramedics, as a result they have now taken suspension trauma into their syllabus.

Change is slow but as long as we make changes for the good it will help those who normally take safety regimes as being over the top, after all when it comes to safety short cuts, the first person you are cheating is yourself.”

Please spend a little time to sign the petition which can be found at:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Suspensiontrauma/

You can read a more detailed explanation of Suspension Trauma at:

http://www.suspensiontrauma.info/

Corporations and the wealthy - £25 billion a year tax avoidance

TUC Press Release

New research for the TUC published today (Friday) reveals that the public purse loses £13 billion a year through tax avoidance by the wealthy and £12 billion a year through tax avoidance by corporations. Altogether this adds up to £25 billion - or around £1,000 a year for everyone at work in the UK.

The research, conducted by accountant and tax specialist Richard Murphy, is published in The Missing Billions, the first in a new series of TUC pamphlets designed to stimulate debate called Touchstones. The research includes the analysis of 344 sets of accounts from Britain’s 50 largest companies and analysis of HMRC and other official statistics.

Analysis of the top 50 companies’ accounts shows that their effective corporation tax rate is 22.5 per cent - not the 30 per cent agreed by Parliament. The companies almost always pay 5 per cent less tax on average than they declare in their accounts and in the seven years up to 2006 their effective tax rate fell by 0.5 per cent each year.

The report shows how super-rich individuals avoid paying their fair share of tax. £3.2 billion tax is lost by turning earned income into investment income (which is taxed more favourably) or by shifting the income to others (such as spouses) in lower or nil tax bands. Another £3.8 billion is lost moving transactions out of the UK, £0.5 billion by turning income into a capital gain and £4.8 billion from various kinds of tax planning.

Half the amount lost to tax avoidance could raise the level at which higher rate tax starts being paid by £10,000 a year, which would also offer significant help to those on middle incomes; or increase the state pension by 20 per cent; or reduce income tax by 3p in the pound; or build an extra 50 hospitals a year.

The Touchstone pamphlet calls for:

a minimum rate of tax to be paid by all those earning more than £100,000 a year to limit their use of tax avoidance and tax planning, without affecting the tax rates of middle Britain
a stop to HMRC staff cuts so that there are sufficient resources to effectively collect tax
the non-dom tax loophole to be abolished
capital gains on assets held for less than a year to be charged to income tax
a change to the tax treatment of charities to give them more income and close a tax loophole, and
the introduction of a new ‘general anti-avoidance principle’ to make it easier to tax the super-rich and large companies.
TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘There is mounting concern at the growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of society, but so far there have been few practical proposals to do anything about it. This TUC pamphlet is therefore doubly helpful. First it carefully works out just how much the super-rich and big companies rip the rest of us off by not paying their fair share of taxes. Secondly it sets out a practical set of policies that close loopholes, end abuse and starts the process of making the super-rich make a proper contribution - all without raising a single tax rate.

‘Our strong view is that the proceeds should be used to properly fund public services, where six million are facing cuts in their real pay, and relieve poverty - particularly child poverty. But you do not have to agree with our spending priorities to back our call for fair tax, and we recognise the argument at this difficult economic time for boosting the income of low and middle Britain through tax cuts.

‘This is not the politics of envy but the economics of fairness. It is all about getting rich and powerful people to understand they must play by the rules, not look for ways round them.

‘Most people think that we have a progressive tax system, but it has now been hollowed out by so many loopholes and allowances that too much tax is now voluntary for the rich. It’s time for a new campaign for a fair tax system - a campaign that can unite the vast majority of the population who do play by the rules and have nothing to fear from our proposals.’