Keep Our NHS Public

Who we are

Keep Our NHS Public is a non-party-political organisation campaigning against the privatisation and underfunding of the NHS. We support campaigns to reverse the privatisation and commercialisation of social care and to call for health and social care services to be publicly funded, publicly provided and accountable provision. Find out more about our campaigns.

Keep Our NHS Public has worked with a number of other campaigns and want to build the widest possible coalition of individual members, local groups and affiliated organisations to achieve our aims.

What Keep Our NHS Public stands for - our enduring values and beliefs
 

NHS and social care service funded by the public

Available to all on the basis of need – we all need health and social care at some time in our lives, but the unlucky ones need more.  We pool our resources and share the risk so that if we are one of the unlucky ones, we are covered by collective provision – to each according to their need.  Public funding should be drawn from progressive taxation, from each according to their ability to pay, with a taxation system that ensures people pay their fair share and taxes the rich appropriately.

Service delivered by staff employed by the public

No-one should be delivering health or care services who have a vested interest which leads them to divert from the principle of meeting need – either in pursuit of personal gain or profit for a private sector body.  We need to be able to trust that the people who care for us have our best interests at heart. Staff should be directly employed with jobs designed to ensure they can give their best to meet the clinical and personal needs of the people they care for.  This applies to all clinical and care staff but also to non-clinical staff such as receptionists and clerical staff, porters and cleaners who make a significant contribution to the quality of the service.  Senior leaders should be judged by how well the core values are demonstrated in the actions of their staff.

Service accountable to the public

We delegate responsibility to government for organising health and social care services and we hold government to account for its stewardship. Health and social care are complex, multi-level services so accountability systems need to reflect this at a national, regional and local level.  An essential element of accountability is a high degree of transparency in all aspects of the performance of health and social care services. 

Who is the public?

We are – all of us who live in this country. We know even more clearly now that the health of each of us is dependent on the health of all of us.  We are genuinely all in this together. No-one should be asked to pay twice, as with migrants who pay through an up-front charge as well as through their taxes, and no-one should be denied treatment, as is done through racist policies like the 'Hostile Environment'.

How We Are Organised

Keep Our NHS Public is an individual membership organisation with supporters in a network of over 70 local health campaign groups. We have some national affiliates and also many supporting groups such as trade unions and organisations focused on other areas of social justice campaigning. We are predominantly organised across England. We have a national office that supports local campaigns and co-ordinates the Executive Committee’s lobbying efforts.

Keep Our NHS Public’s sovereign body is our Steering Group, made up from the representatives of all of our local groups and other full affiliates. The Steering Group decides our major campaigning and policy positions. The day-to-day running of the organisation is carried out by the Executive Committee members with a small team of paid staff.