Public Health cuts will cost lives

We have a fantastic National Health Service which helps ill people get better. It is underfunded. We also have a Public Health Service, run by Councils, which helps people not get ill in the first place. That is also underfunded – and matters are about to get worse. The Government’s Public Health Grant to Tower Hamlets Council has been cut, and the Council will be scaling back services accordingly.

The Council is now running a public consultation on which Public Health activities it should cut or reduce (on the Council website – see link below). Services are divided into seven groups. There’s a short description of what each group of services does and how the proposed cuts would change this. Unfortunately, most of the description is written in “Council-ese” – a strangely contorted language only spoken in the Town Hall, which is not understood by most regular people.

The Public Health Team has clearly tried hard to find ways to cut funding without affecting services. It has adjusted targets and sometimes hopes that other bodies will pick up a service or replace funding. Their proposals are clearly not the ideas of nasty people, but they do seem to be guilty of wishful thinking.

Some of its proposals seem to be cuts on paper, rather than in real life. For example, shifting people from the least successful stop smoking programme to the most successful one will improve the cessation rate, they hope – so it will look like the cost per quitter is less! Other proposals are a bit cheeky: stopping working with the youth service to educate young people about tobacco because schools already do that work, for example.

Well meaning though this is, and even though it must be a good idea for Public Health to keep its services under review, there’s no disguising the fact that with less money coming down to the Council, less Public Health work will be done and people will get sick as a result.

The public consultation is positive in one sense: there is a very user-friendly way of giving your feedback. There are tick boxes for you to say if you think the proposals will have a positive or negative impact and then you can say what the impact will be, which is good. Unfortunately, it is very hard to read through the descriptions of the proposed cuts and understand them before you give your opinion on them.

It is disappointing that the Council has just got down to the business of cutting services to match the cut in government grant. There is no sign of it having protested to the Government about the human costs of its cuts – or of anyone having worked out how much it will cost the NHS to deal with sick people who could have been kept well by Public Health services.

You can help make up for the lack of protest by the Council so far by responding to the online consultation and making the Council aware there will be a negative impact from their cuts.

•The Council’s public consultation on the cuts closes on 16th June. To take part in the consultation, follow the below link. Another way to find the page is to choose “C” in the A-Z list on the home page, go to page 4 and choose “Consultations” – then choose “Public Health” from the list on the left. From there, you will be directed to other pages for information and to give your views.
http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/council_and_democracy/consultations/Public_health_savings_consultation/Public_health_savings_consultation.aspx

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