Health and Wellbeing

Should our public services be run to make life easier for politicians and managers or to make life better for the people who need them and pay for them? Who would you rather made healthcare decisions that affect you; a doctor or an accountant? How do you get your voice heard when you have concerns about your local NHS services?

The Green Party wants health care to serve people not businesses. That means building a partnership between local government, public sector workers and the communities they serve. It doesn't mean wasting our money by:

paying a private company £240m to provide a hospital that could have been built for £60m less on the NHS paying priviate health care providers to do work that the NHS should do for half the cost paying private cleaning companies to clean our hospitals operating a market in health care that mirrors the apalling US system The Green Party is the only major party to say no to private companies running NHS services.

Greens want NHS staff, doctors, patients and the public to have a real say in how local services are run. We want local NHS services to be directly accountable to local government, just as they are in other countries. This will give local people far more voice than even ministers have at present.

We want healthcare that aims not just to cure but also to prevent illness, and we want local services that make our cities, towns and villages wonderful places to live. All our policies will enhance health, from increasing walking and cycling to fresh, local food in schools and reducing pollution.

Greens want many more services to be free at the point of use, including prescriptions, eye tests and dental treatment. We want services to be as local as possible - no centralised in some distant city. Often the people who need health care services are the more vulnerable members of our society with less access to personal transport and less money to pay for eye tests, prescriptions and dental treatments. Our services should focus on their needs.

Led by Darren Johnson AM, who is also a local councillor, the Greens in the London Assembly are championing the right of Londoners to have clinics, libraries and post offices within walking distance of their homes. Green MEPs Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas are fighting to prevent Britain's public services from being forced open to international competition and privatisation. As part of the Social Europe Campaign, Jean called for the guaranteed inclusion of public services in the EU Constitutional Treaty.