Councillors joined campaigners for an event to highlight what they say is the threat to an NHS doctors\u2019 surgery from a private company.<\/p>\n
Labour councillors David McGregor and Andrei Czolak turned out to support a tug of war held at the Old Steine on Saturday (14 June).<\/p>\n
The event was organised by Sussex Defend the NHS, with the tug of war chosen to symbolise the plight of the Wellsbourne Healthcare surgery in Whitehawk.<\/p>\n
The campaign group is raising awareness of a proposal to change who runs health services at the NHS surgery. It is currently operated by Wellsbourne Healthcare Community Interest Company (CIC).<\/p>\n
The CIC stepped in when a private company walked away in 2016 in a financial dispute with NHS commissioners \u2013 and the official watchdog has rated the current service as good.<\/p>\n
But the commissioners recently published a notice of their intention to award the contract for running the surgery to another private company, One Medical Group, based in Leeds.<\/p>\n
Taking part in the tug-of-war were GPs (general practitioners), health workers, patients and volunteers from Wellsbourne Healthcare.<\/p>\n
Sussex Defend the NHS campaigner Janet Sang said: \u201cThere was fantastic public support for Wellsbourne Healthcare CIC on Saturday at our tug of war.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were many more of us campaigning for people, not profit, and we won each time against the private, for profit One Medical Group and the commissioners.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Councillors joined campaigners for an event to highlight what they say is the threat to an NHS doctors\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4316],"tags":[105,4348,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-198989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114713918805356728","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}