Last week I asked people emerging from the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton to sign a petition against privatisation of the National Health Service.

A well-suited young man replied that he would sign it.

He explained that he wasn’t representing the hearing aid firm he worked for by signing it, but because the audiology department in the RSCH does a first-class job.

Audiology has been selected as one of the first services to be offered to the private sector by NHS Sussex under the new Health and Social Care Act.

This legislation has been pushed through Parliament by the Conservative and LibDem coalition despite opposition from every medical organisation you could think of – all Royal colleges, the BMA and all health worker unions.

Never has such a massive reorganisation of a major public service been undertaken without a glimmer of support from any of the people who work in the industry.

Are the people of Brighton and Hove aware this Act heralds the decline of the NHS as a national service?

I say this because, before this Act, the Government had a duty to provide a comprehensive health service. But that’s now gone.

The Government doles out the money and, in effect, says to doctors, “Get on with whatever this pays for,” whether or not it is enough to provide a complete health service.

In tough times it clearly isn’t going to be enough.

And thanks to this Act, when budgets get squeezed, hospitals are now allowed to accept as many private patients as they like. So all you NHS patients out there, you go to the back of the queue.

The NHS is likely to suffer a slow death as its range of services is reduced to fit whatever the Government chooses to give and services become fragmented as more services are offered to big private companies.

Welcome to healthcare under the coalition.

Ken Kirk, Tower Road, Brighton