Over the past year there has been a growth in organization and activism among NHS staff, and increasing engagement in speaking out about the appalling conditions the NHS is being driven to by austerity.
This is an enormously positive development and can not come soon enough. NHS privatisation is rapidly accelerating and engulfing more of the service daily, and the government is committed to limiting the NHS budget in order to force $ 22 billion of savings out of the service over the next 5 years, an impossible target which if met would mean wholesale destruction of huge swathes of service, and much damage to patient's and staff's lives.
Much of the organising has taken place on social media, beginning with doctors and healthworkers speaking out during last winter's A & E crisis, laying the blame publicly on government policy for the crisis. It has been organized around certain campains, like the NHS Bill 2015 campaign for the NHS reinstatement bill, or the Resilient GP campaign around Dr Meirion Thomas. The issue which galvinised the biggest coordinated response was Jeremy Hunt's attacks on Consultants and doctors in general for not working weekends. This generated the #Iminworkjeremy hashtag which was taken up by thousands of healthworkers across the country and received widespread media coverage.
There are indications that activists are now taking steps to cohere this newly politicized layer of healthworkers into organization, forming organizations like NHS Survival. This is necessary as while social media campaigns can secure some victories and raise awareness, they are not enough to secure changes in government policy, or management policy in the workplace.
The next goal for activists should be developing coordination and organization among activists nationally, with the aim of developing local workplace organization which can connect this newly energized and engaged layer with the rest of the NHS workforce, so they can be organized and mobilized together against the governments attacks .
