Video from last Friday’s Old Street roundabout roadblock protest against the placing of job coaches in GPs’ surgeries (read more here).
Includes short interviews with DPAC’s Paula Peters, junior doctor Mona Kamal and footage of some tosser who said he didn’t care why people were protesting. Charming.
Transcript after the video:
Transcript:
Paula Peters, Disabled People Against Cuts
Right, welcome to the Surgeries for Treatment, Jobcentres for Jobs protest. We are seeing now jobcentre coaches from Maximus, the US healthcare company based in GPs’ surgeries such as this one behind us which is City Road Surgery. What we’re seeing here is GPs in this surgery prescribing job coaching for hard to reach claimants on Employment and Support Allowance. This is targeted at mental health claimants.
Mona Kamal, Junior Doctor
I’m here today because I am a psychiatrist, I work in mental health, I’ve been working in mental health for several years and I’m here basically because I witness first hand the impact of these austerity cuts on psychiatric patients in particular. I’ve witnessed this over the years and we’ve also seen the evidence now in terms of the research that came out towards the end of last year about these additional suicides that have been linked to the work capability assessments in particular.
Chanting:
The NHS makes us well. The Tories make us sick.
Martin Tolley:
With the DWP it’s not voluntary, it’s mandatory. We all know that and then to allow these job coaches to have access to your medical records and be able to leave notes on your medical records, and I’m not standing for it. My medical records are private. They are not there for every Tom, Dick and Harry to have a look at and add their comments to it.
Member of the public:
Can you get out of the way.
Protestor:
Do you know why we’re doing this?
Member of the public:
No and I don’t really care. Because the rest of us… the rest of us…have had enough.
Paula Peters:
…disabled people would have taken their own lives, due to the stress and the fear of government policy. So I think you can bear with us as we block the road for a bit, don’t you.
Posting here will less frequent for the next few months while I work on a case studies project. There will be more from this article in that project. You can still get in touch here.