Forward thinking
Reforms are needed quickly if the NHS is to survive years of staffing shortages while we endeavour to train an army of hospital workers from scratch
AWAY for a few days in the Cotswolds, we pitched up at a country pub in our muddy boots for an evening meal.
Thoughts of a hearty feast of pie and chips beside a roaring log fire vanished however when we got there to find it shut.
Not enough staff to open seven days a week said a local, barely able to conceal an eye roll at our stupidity.
Likewise at a nearby restaurant. They could squeeze us in at 5pm but after that the kitchen was closed. Lack of chefs.
Staffing shortages are nothing new here in our post-Brexit, postCovid world.
Employees in all sectors have found other jobs, other ways to make a living, or have gone back to their homeland.
But while it’s one thing not being able to secure a pint, it’s quite another when you can’t get your routine surgery or MRI scan.
There are shortages and there are shortages, the one currently being experienced by our health service is the one we should all be focussed on right now.
As of June 2021, there were 93,000 vacancies across the NHS. Doctors, nurses, porters, radiologists, anaesthetists, cleaners; wherever you look across hospitals and clinics and surgeries there are simply not enough people.
How does this manifest itself?
Well, for a friend’s dad it means a long wait for a new hip. As I write he’s looking to sell his car to get the cash to go private because he’s in too much pain to sit (very uncomfortably) on a waiting list.
Contrast that to 15 or so years ago when my husband’s gran, weary of a worn out knee caused by a lifetime working as a cleaner, decided she would have a new one.
Within weeks the operation was done and dusted and, despite being in her late 80s, she was out and about once more, her quality of life restored
It’s taken too many people too long to realise that the NHS isn’t about state-ofthe-art diagnostic machines or the latest medicines or multi-million pound hospitals.
The NHS is about its workforce.
The long term failure to invest in it is an absolute scandal. We simply haven’t trained enough doctors and nurses.
The result of that lack of staff is incremental, building year on year, the strain on the system – and the current staff – made worse by an ageing population.
Yes, there are improvements on the horizon with more training places becoming available for tomorrow’s doctors and nurses but clinical staff, like Rome, are not built in a day.
What happens in the meantime? What’s the plan?
For some it’s paying to go private. For those less able to do that it might be a painful, worrying wait.
For NHS staff already in the system it’s just more hard work.
I’m not clever enough to know all the answers.
But I do know that a root and branch reform is required to future proof us against this labour shortage ever happening again.