The Guardian reports an interview with Dr Katherine Henderson, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine this morning.
As she has noted, pressure in the NHS is now so severe that it is breaking its “basic agreement” with the public to treat the sickest in a timely way.
She also noted that the:
urgent and emergency care was in a “deeper crisis than ever before”, and for the first time in its history the NHS could no longer stick to its “contract” with the nation to promptly reach seriously ill patients who dial 999.
Her explanation was:
“The true barrier to tackling this crisis is political unwillingness,” Henderson said. “The current situation is breaking the workforce and breaking our hearts.”
Hospitals are facing record demand from patients coming forward after two years of the pandemic, while struggling to discharge patients because of the crisis in social care.
As a result, Henderson said, doctors are struggling to find any space for patients arriving at A&E. That is causing record delays in ambulances handing over patients, which is leading to waits of up to 22 hours for 999 callers.
At the same time, as reported in the Sunday Times yesterday, moves are being made to end the separation of patients with Covid from other patients within hospital. As one hospital consultant, who is utterly committed to it, noted as a result, this makes the H in NHS stand for Harm.
None of this, in my opinion, is the fault of an NHS employee. It is, instead, wholly the government's fault.
First, it has been utterly negligent on Covid. The Covid pandemic is not over. Covid is not endemic. More than 350 people dies of Covid in one day last week. Around one in 12 people in the country have it. The illness is serious with potential long term impacts for many that are massive. And some people are getting it successively, within weeks of bouts. Despite this the government has turned its back on this issue, pretending it does not exist, when the impact is enormous, as indicated by everything from failed flights onwards. Irresponsibility on this scale cannot be made up.
Second, it has deliberately under-resourced the NHS, knowing that there is excess demand for healthcare now and knowing that there is a need for staff morale to be raised.
Third, it is under-resourcing social care still and has no real plan to change that, in which case bed-blocking will continue and that is now causing crisis conditions in many hospitals.
Fourth, it has no plan of any sort to remedy this because all it wants to do is balance its budget, which is the last thing it needs to do and which is wholly unnecessary.
In other words, the whole NHS crisis is government manufactured, deliberately.
What is required to solve it?
First, it's the capacity to care.
Second, there has to be the willingness to use the power of government to redirect resources in society.
Third, there has to be the willingness to fund this, which does require new money creation.
Fourth, there has too to be the need to create the social conditions in which people can flourish, which requires redistribution of income and wealth.
Fifth, there must be the willingness to explain this, and get buy in.
Sixth, there is a need for commitment, which is wholly absent.
These are desperate times. There is no guarantee the NHS will survive this. And that is all down to choice by Tory governments.
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Unlike your article regarding the lack of a government strategy to address climate change, here I believe the government has a very clear strategy for our NHS.
With respect to our NHS the government has a strategy and a long term plan of action that has in large part been authored in collaboration with the large American health insurance companies.
The current run down is deliberate in that at a certain point it will be essential for people in the U.K. to start paying for services which, surprise, surprise, will be available through initially discounted health insurance plans provided by these companies.
The main problem for the American insurance companies is removing those who cannot pay for health services and these appear to be very conveniently being removed from association with our NHS and dumped in the public remit thereby making health insurance even more profitable.
If I had the resources I would like to investigate just how many Tory MP’s are associated with insurance companies, especially the American ones.
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/11/12/the-conservative-partys-private-healthcare-patrons/
Not all insurance companies, but these are links to healthcare companies.
Sunak has links to healthcare companies in the US.
One problem coming soon is the changes to ICS in the NHS, which could allow private health companies onto the boards to decide who runs our NHS.
Weownit.org.uk is asking people to send letters to their local NHS leaders to persuade them to get private profits out of our NHS.
bit.ly/FindMyNHS is a link to send this letter to your local leader. They are also sending out leaflets and posters with QR codes on them with a direct link when you have put in your postcode.
If I was looking at two obvious steps that would have an immediate benefit on the NHS
1. A lot of time & effort is taken up with drunks, in the short term, as well as the long term an increase in the price and reduction in the availability of alcohol would reduce demand on the NHS as well as reducing crime and disorder.
2. A reduction in, and enforcement of the speed limit would reduce the number and seriousness of road traffic collision injuries as well as carbon emissions, oil consumption etc
What you seem to be saying is that we should reduce the need for the NHS by changing people’s behaviour. Isn’t that gaslighting? We need to return to proper funding for the NHS, decent tarining schemes, including nursing bursaries, and management that manages in the interests of the NHS and of nothing else.
We need bioth
I am not sure it’s gaslighting to say so
My Tory friends will counter that argument saying that the N.I. contributions are going ahead will directly fund more Social Care and the NHS.
Also they claim that more money than any other government has been allocated to the NHS and quote figures accordingly. How would the average person in the street believe otherwise? The average Sun or Daily Mail reader then pops to the polling office come election time and vote the Tories back in again.
The real message is not getting through to the general public even when NHS waiting times are now horrendous. I live in the South West and its true blue tory down here and we have a lot of old age pensioners who more than anyone need the NHS so it’s an up hill task to change for a better progressive political way.
That’s like saying that more money has been allocated to education so all must be well when the number of children has risen by 50% and the funding increase is 5%
a) There is a backlog
b) Mediucence is ever more complex
c) It’s hard work when most people do not do work that hard
d) It is under-rewarded for most
e) It clearly has not got funding – and the NIC levy has been balanced by cuts
No RTory argument works
What happened to the biggest contribution, the £350 million a week on the side of the bus, said to be going to the NHS, on top of what was already being paid to them?
I’m in broad agreement with ChrisK on this. I have little doubt that what we are seeing is a deliberate destruction of the NHS to open-up opportunities for private profit. This latter part of the process will be described (as usual) as injecting private sector investment.
I’m afraid they will get away with it. By the time of the next general election the process will be too far advanced to reverse.
Dismal isn’t it ?
Alan Budd – Thatcher’s economic advisor – thought that that was all he was doing too – getting extra resources.
Unfortunately, the resources he put in were extractive ‘resources’ as he laments in the documentary film ‘The Divide’.
I heard you on TV today and what you say is all true but I don’t think the BBC presenter was very impressed maybe it’s because some of them earning big money also use offshore accounts.
It’s not often reported that was one reason the Tories wanted Brexit as the EU was or is cracking down on this schemes.
I thought she responded well
And your accusation is I suspect wholly misplaced in this case
Unfortunately, this argument only works if you have a main opposition party who thinks differently.
And we don’t.
So, the NHS is fucked – plain and simple.
What makes me laugh is that you can go to any public record office in the country and get a copy of your birth certificate.
So the idea that the government or politicians have been ‘caught out’ by a baby boom turning into a ‘pensioner boom’ that they seem to have discovered is a load of bollocks. They’ve seen the figures a long time ago.
The question we should be asking of Labour as much as the Tories is:
‘You know about the birthrates in this country – why have you done NOTHING to fund the need you promised meet when you created the NHS’?
Why would we create something that we knew we wouldn’t be able to afford?
The answer is that that is the wrong question.
The question is ‘What made you change your mind and why? And who benefits?’. When did they decide not to fund it and why? A conscious decision, because DECIDE they did.
Those are the questions to my mind that remain unanswered.
Why? Because the Tories are manufacturing consent to privatise it by making it crap – like the planning system in my other post, they are going to break it to get what they and rich chums want because the Tory party will get some of the profits from the investment returns. It’s simple isn’t it?
And Labour are cynically letting them do it because it is risky and unpopular and they don’t want the hassle but in essence that bunch of craven and cowardly politicians would do exactly the same.
God help us that we are so poorly represented at the moment in the supposed ‘Mother of all Parliaments’!
Mother? This temple of democracy has become something Jesus would recognise during his time:-
Jesus at the Temple:
12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. 13 “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’[a] but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’[b]”
Make no mistake, the Tories have turned Parliament into a warehouse selling publicly owned goods without our permission or any sense of the consequences for the people they rule over.
I like that contextual quote
I am pleased that you like the quote.
But it also proves that we’ve seen this all before.
It seems that some of us will never learn to be decent human beings.
I absolutely agree that the Tory strategy is to gt the public to move to private health care with the NHS as a residual / medicaid service. The Integrated Care Systems that are being implemented as we speak perfectly sets this up. An organisation with a finite budget and a defined population – NB unregistered patients will be the responsibility of no-one! Covid has just been the perfect gift to turbo charge the change. I know that if I needed a hip replacement now that, much against my own wishes, I would find the money to go private rather than wait in growing agony and disability for 3 years.
Note also the statements from the NHS Confederation today (report in the Graun linked).
Very pithy from the CEO on BBC Breakfast News this morning:
“In our view, we do not have a living-with-Covid plan, we have a living-without-restrictions ideology, which is different.”
The media should be shouting this from the rooftops but… silence.
Where is the voice of Her Majesties Loyal Opposition opposing this? Almost total silence and I am beginning to suspect that privatising our NHS is another of Starmers ideological dreams.
Unfortunately, the dead hand of New Labour thought continues to dominate under Starmer. I wonder how long it will take for them to realise that “We’ll be a bit less crap than them” isn’t really a proper electoral tactic?
Oddly enough, I’m sort of hoping that Starmer’s Labour will continue on the rubbish path they are already on and then, at the 11th hour, panic when they realise it isn’t going to work (despite however appalling the Tories may be). As long as they’ve then got the time to get into a progressive alliance and promise proper electoral reform so that we have Proportional Representation in the future (like the grown ups), things can then surely only get better? If I was a Tory, this would be my biggest fear. If we can get Parliament to implement PR, the Tories will most likely be spending a lot of time in opposition to a coalition much to the left of where we’ve been dragged since the 1980s.
I have two recent examples to show that the UK private health sector is also currently lacking capacity.
A woman in Leeds was in such pain waiting for an NHS hip replacement that she paid to be assessed and added to the op list of a private chain. Weeks passed with no date set. They advised her it could be done sooner at their hospital a bit further away – and made her pay to be assessed for that hospital too. Still no date set. She called the NHS to ask where she was on their waiting list and was offered a cancellation slot. Op a great success.
A previously healthy Hertfordshire man had an emergency NHS admission and was put on their waiting list for surgery to treat a painful condition. Having checked out the length of NHS wait and the offerings of his local private hospitals, he opted to pay for the surgery to be done swiftly and successfully in a well appointed hospital in the country he left fifty years ago to settle in the UK.
People need to know that having the money to pay is not now a magic ticket to swift care.
I am not sure you really make your case
My case, with concrete recent examples,a is that people are having difficulty accessing private let alone NHS care. Many if not most people assume that private care is immediately available for those who pay. This is not currently the case.
The NHS has been under attack since it’s inception. After centuries of rigid customs and excise laws and punitive measures for non payment of tax, the creation of tax avoidance laws capable of supporting the emergence of the offshore tax havens in the 70s most likely began in the fifties, as the NHS was created. They, along with techniques to incur extra burden on the NHS through the creation of ill health in a variety of ways, are guaranteeing support amongst the Tory ranks for privatisation.
But the existence of the NHS guarantees us all the capability of moving up to the aesthetic level of Maslow’s hierarchy of self actualisation. When the wolf is back at the door, due to privatisation, the lack of cognitive spare room due to the added burden of worry, will lead to the emergence of violent crime, partisan violence, and all the other consequences of the aggregative consequences of that stressed cognition.
If America had NHS and welfare, and kept guns, gun crime would virtually disappear. But the US and other countries in the world use the threat of poverty to maintain fear of loss of employment, and thus political quietude. No one speaks out because they risk losing their job. And that is why America is right wing, because they aren’t. They just daren’t speak out, and the upper classes are either right wing or perceived as right wing, so they all cling to right wing beliefs or they might be surrendered into poverty.
And that fate awaits us in Britain if we lose the NHS.
But whilst we maintain it, the poor in those nations that don’t, flood towards us as immigrants, and our example continues to suggest to the people of those nations that it can be done, that it is a real possibility.
So, the tax avoidance is brought into existence in order to make it look like the welfare state is a financial impossibility.
We should be at war with those nations as they are at war with us.
Alternatively tax avoidance must end.
There is a lot in here that is just wrong
And the ability to pay for the NHS is not dependent upon beating tax abuse
Sorry – but please read some more before commenting inaccurately here. Your arguments are really not credible in almost any case