PUBLIC MEETING REPORT & PICS

Over 100 people attended Worthing KONP's first public meeting on Saturday at the Richmond Rooms. Local residents & hospital staff enjoyed three superb speakers and a lively, serious and informative debate with questions and contributions from the audience. Check back on the site soon for video footage of the meeting and speeches.



Guest speaker John McDonnell MP, who will be challenging Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership, expressed his support for Worthing's campaign and said that all over the country ordinary people are coming together to march and to demonstrate against cutbacks in services and the sacking of NHS staff. He said: "There is a sense of urgency; the threats to the NHS are now so severe that potentially we will lose it"

Also addressing the meeting were Dr J M Semmens, retired consultant paediatrician - at Worthing & Southlands hospitals for twenty years - and Gill George, health worker and on the executive of trade union Amicus, who said cuts and closures of local services mean people will be harmed - with children and their carers particularly at risk. Government reforms propose care be delivered closer to home, "but to pretend that community care can simply slot in and replace acute hospital care is nonsense", she said. A question and answer session included many passionately expressed views from the floor.

Many speakers stressed how unnecessary the government's proposed cuts are from a finanical point of view - with the national NHS debt actually running at a mere £500 million, and that this shows how the cuts and closures agenda is driven by an obsession with allowing market forces to dictate our health care. The grave danger is that we are heading for an American-style system of private healthcare for the some, meagre public health insurance schemes for many, and no healthcare at all for the least well off.

The audience responded with loud cheers when speakers called for the "missing NHS money" to be found by scraping the new Trident nuclear weapons plans (at least £35 BILLION) or by pulling out the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (£8 BILLION to date)



Lee Billingham, chair of Worthing KONP was delighted with the support shown at the meeting and said: "We are an active group that involves local patients and health care staff. We will be marching with other hospital campaigners from West Sussex in a national lobby of parliament on 1st November, and we are planning more local meetings, town centre stalls and other events which we hope people will support.
We are fighting to save our publicly owned and run National Health Service. No cuts, No Closures, No Sell-offs!"