 | 'The current wave of PFI-funded investment involves the most drastic reductions in acute hospital capacity seen in the NHS. Each of the first wave of PFI-funded hospitals is a two or three-into-one scheme where the building of one new hospital is posited on the closure of at least two others. Bed reductions are, on average, 30% of current available beds. Nursing staff budgets are being cut by 10%-20%. It is the scale of service reduction and privatisation associated with PFI which the SNP proposals were intended to address. Mr Galbraith asks if the SNP is saying it does not want the new hospitals and schools this investment is building. This is an insult to voters, implying the dazzling facades of new hospitals will blind them to the reductions in services required to pay for them.' Declan Gaffney and Professor Allyson Pollock of the Health Policy and Health Services Research Unit, School of Public Policy, University College, London, February 17 th 1999. |  |
