- Conference
- 2009 Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 10 December 2008
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes the incredibly moving contribution last year from Dorothy Ngoma, of the National Organisation of Nurses and Midwives of Malawi: an organisation set up with the support of UNISON.
The hardships faced by our colleagues in health care in the developing world and the patients they serve are immense, complicated, saddening but avoidable with better support from the West. It is sobering to reflect on the fact that the entirety of developing nations’ financial debt to the west is a mere fraction of the trillions of pounds pumped into the global financial markets to bail out western banks. These are the very financial institutions which have insisted upon privatisations of fledgling health care systems as conditions of loans or debt relief.
UNISON has a fine track record on internationalism, and the Malawi initiative is an example of this. But we could do more.
Beyond our commitment to national issues of development, aid and debt relief, we call on the SGE to support a number of more practical solidarity initiatives:
1.In partnership with NHS employers and relevant other agencies, identify means by which interested UK staff, including those recently retired, can be supported to travel and make time-limited contributions to health care work and/or staff development overseas without loss of employment rights and to develop guidelines to help guide local employers.
2.In partnership with government, NHS employers and Higher Education Institutions develop and fund programmes of educational scholarships and training for overseas staff to learn specialist skills in the UK to take back to their home nations’ health care systems.
3.We would also ask that the Health Service Group Executive consider a bursary for outstanding activist contribution to overseas development, to be spent on supporting the development work of the winner or branch.