About Vital Signs
Vital Signs is a magazine by a group of workers across the two main hospitals in Bristol – you know the hospitals, one where the lifts never come, but the ceiling falls on your head, and the other hospital dressed up as an airport with a £250,000 clock that nobody knows how to read. This magazine represents an effort to create a forum where together with co-workers we can reflect on our experiences, our struggles and our potential to create solidarity across bands, departments and professions. In times of crisis and attacks on working and living conditions we need bonds of support between health workers and working class patients.
Vital Signs is a magazine for the struggle for a new society. The global scenario of wars, climate crisis and the social atmosphere of dog-eat-dog turn us into passive spectators. As individual workers, we stay weak and divided, but collectively we have a unique position: our work and collaboration ranges from hospital wards to medical labs, from operating theatres to medical science departments, from community surgeries to manufacturing sites for devices and implants. As united health workers we know about both social needs and technological developments and from this basis we can contribute to an alternative vision of a new human society: where we use knowledge and technology consciously for a better life for all, not for bullshit jobs, profits and wars.
Vital Signs starts from the premises that any attempt to build working class power has to start from us, the workers ourselves. We have to develop our own organisations and institutions that we can use to direct our own struggles. We have to remain independent from those organisations that are restricted by their own interests, such as parliamentarian parties and trade unions. As we have seen, in moments of crisis, governments rely on workers in industries such as ours – those that are essential to society functioning – to keep things running. In these moments of crisis, we have to be in a position to put forward an alternative vision and lead the struggle to achieve it.
International exchange between workers is paramount – we are always interested in hearing from fellow workers wherever you are.
If you want to send us reports or get in touch, write to us at: vitalsignsmag@proton.me
Twitter: @healthworkersu1
Instagram: @vitalsignsmag
Facebook: BristolSolidarity
‘Vital Signs’ is entirely self-funded, if you want to support us financially please donate here: