Health

	The Templars recognise that our National Health Service is in desperate need of rescuing. This is one of our main priorities. We plan massive reforms in all areas of health, and to begin the rebuilding process on one of Britain's greatest institutions.
We will seek to drastically cut red tape which is now so rampant in the NHS that the number of jobs involving hospital management have trebled since 1997. The number of managers increased by three times the number of doctors last year, and there are now more managers than beds in the NHS for the first time.
Topic Links www.keepournhspublic.com www.cutredtape.org
Our Policies 1. Keeping the NHS public. It goes without saying that we strongly oppose the growing privatisation and commercialisation of our NHS, and an overwhelming 89% of the public agree that "public services should be run by the government or local authorities, rather than by private companies". Under Labour 'reform' increasingly means stealth privatisation and other commercialisation. Privatisation of community and hospital parts of the NHS, and buying corporate health services, will land the NHS with large administrative costs. And proper and transparent planning of future health services has largely been sacrificed for the sake of creating a healthcare market for big corporations and competing foundation trusts which demand 'commercial confidentiality'. We believe that health care is an entitlement to which we all contribute, and that risk sharing is and always has been the best method in taxation. This basically means that poorer people - who have higher rates of sickness and illness than the wealthy - are not penalised for being both sick and poor. It allows those with the greatest health and wealth to share the benefits of their good fortune with those who are not so fortunate.
2. Cutting red tape. We will seek to drastically cut red tape which is now so rampant in the NHS that the number of jobs involving hospital management have trebled since 1997, the number of managers increased by three times the number of doctors last year, and there are now more managers than beds in the NHS for the first time. Furthermore we will aim to totally decentralise day to day running, by cutting wasteful and unproductive layers of management from NHS facilities. We will purge the dozens of pointless government quangos and use the money to invest in superior local health facilities, which are run by local boards.
3. Stabilising the NHS. In addition to the above two long term goals, we will seek to achieve numerous short term goals to improve the standard of NHS facilities. We will aim to re-open all of the hospitals closed by Thatcher in the 1980s, and by Thatcherites Blair and Brown since the mid-1990s. We will create hundreds of new jobs using much the same budget, by cutting out excessive waste and mis-management. We will offer subsidies on university fees as incentives for future doctors and nurses. We will endeavour to increase wages for over-worked hospital staff, create a more friendly work schedule, and provide a much safer working environment in order to recruit new staff. We will extend the opening hours of GP surgeries to evenings and weekends, to help deal with waiting lists. And provide qualified chemists with a license to write prescriptions for common problems. This will relieve strain on GPs considerably, potentially cutting appointments by up to 50%.
4. Tackling real health issues. We will ensure that parents of girls under the age of 16 who request the morning after pill, or an abortion are notified about the request. We hope this will encourage youngsters to practice safer sex, and help us combat the explosion of STDs. We will stop the worrying practice of giving long lasting contraceptive injections to girls as young as 13 on the NHS. Aside from promoting unsafe underage sex, and helping to spread STDs, giving hormonal contraceptives to young girls can cause side affects including premature bone loss.