Heart op Duke’s hospital transfer
THE Duke of Edinburgh returned to London’s King EdwardVII Hospital by ambulance yesterday after having heart surgery in an NHS unit.
Prince Philip, 99, is likely to spend a third weekend there following his 18th night under the care of doctors – his longest stay in hospital.
The Duke had a successful procedure for a heart condition at St Bartholemew’s Hospital in the capital on Wednesday. He has also been treated for an infection.
At King Edward VII he may be able to have visitors, who are allowed in under special circumstances despite Covid restrictions.
At St Barts, patients are only allowed visits if they are at the end of their life or have lost the ability to make decisions for themselves. Prince Charles visited his father at King EdwardVII’s last month.
Buckingham Palace aides said yesterday: “His Royal Highness has been transferred to King Edward VII’s Hospital. The Duke is expected to remain in hospital for continuing treatment for a number of days.”
An ambulance, followed by a car containing his police protection officers, was seen leaving St Barts.
Philip, the nation’s longest-serving consort, was admitted to King Edward VII’s – the Royal Family’s favoured hospital – on February 16 for observation and rest after he felt unwell at Windsor Castle.
When he was moved three miles to St Barts, officials revealed he was suffering from a heart condition.
This is understood to relate to a problem in December 2011, when the Duke had a stent fitted in order to treat a blocked coronary artery.
He had been flown by helicopter from Norfolk’s royal estate of Sandringham to Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, suffering chest pains.
St Bartholomew’s is home to Barts Heart Centre – Europe’s largest specialised cardiovascular service.
Private as well as NHS patients are treated there.
Philip, who received his first Covid jab in January, has spent most of lockdown at Windsor Castle with the Queen for their safety accompanied by a reduced household of staff that has been nicknamed HMS Bubble.
The Queen has continued with her official duties while her husband of 73 years has been in hospital.
Family members have been able to call him. This week, his daughter-inlaw Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, said they were keeping their fingers crossed for him.
DESPITE all their heroic work saving lives during the pandemic, NHS workers were never going to get a big pay rise this year. Given the contraction of the economy caused by the Covid onslaught and its impact on the public finances, almost everyone understood that. Due reward was going to have to wait for the economic bounceback predicted by the experts to actually take place.
But that still left Chancellor Rishi Sunak with a choice between something relatively modest that would nonetheless send a signal to more than a million NHS staff that they were valued enough to be made a priority even in these tough times, or something insultingly meagre. Sunak, presumably acting with the support of Boris Johnson, chose meagre.
A recommended one per cent pay rise after the extraordinary efforts of the past year – think of the countless times when nurses, doctors, hospital porters, ambulance crews and the rest went above and beyond the call of duty – is bound to be interpreted as a kick in the teeth. Rightly so.
As Emily Huntingford, an intensive care nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, put it: “The first thing that came to mind was that this is insulting. It shows a complete disregard for the work NHS workers have done. We’ve put ourselves at risk.”
IS A one per cent rise an adequate reflection of the gratitude felt for staff by the millions of us who banged our saucepans on Thursday evenings last summer? Of course not. How ironic that a Chancellor who clearly did not properly decode the meaning of the clang of spoons on metal pans has turned out to have a tin ear for the priorities of the British public in this regard.
Had Mr Sunak recommended one per cent for higher earning hospital doctors but pledged to fund, say, three per cent for lower-paid NHS occupations then many of the former would no doubt have understood.
But no. Instead, the NHS workforce is being invited to continue working under the most intense pressure for many months ahead – the backlog of cases for killer conditions such as cancer and heart disease is enormous – while digesting the notion that a Government it thought had changed its attitude towards them has apparently reverted to type.
The decision has left Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer feeling in tune with public opinion for the first time since he was elected last April. Arguing that for many the recommended rise would not even cover increases in living costs, he observed: “You can’t rebuild a country by cutting nurses’ pay.”
Starmer should not get carried away. For starters, any sane voter contemplating whether they would prefer to have Rishi Sunak or his hapless Labour shadow Anneliese Dodds in charge of economic management is not going to take long to decide.
Yet Sunak also missed the mark on another vital healthcare issue in his Budget. He said nothing whatever about any plan to rejuvenate social care for the elderly, despite the horrendous Covid death toll in care homes highlighting the urgency of this long-promised reform.
When asked about the omission, he implied that cross-party support was a pre-condition for any plan going ahead. Presumably, he fears voters will punish the Tories alone if they implement any new tax measure to finance improvements.
The 2017 election campaign in which Theresa May’s socalled “dementia tax” – a planned levy on the value of homes – blew up in Conservative faces, has clearly left them reluctant to address the issue afresh.
This isn’t good enough either. Not for a party that is led by a PM who promised on his very first day in office: “We will fix the crisis in social care once and for all.”
BORIS Johnson did not make Labour support a precondition when he said that – even though he had no parliamentary majority at the time. How much less excuse he now has with a landslide majority behind him.
Should Mr Johnson fail to sort out the parlous state of the social care sector, one should not judge him any more harshly than Tony Blair, who also failed to tackle the issue despite being in a position to do so. But frankly, many of us had higher hopes of this administration.
The overall fabric of our healthcare system has withstood the huge strains of the pandemic, just. But the need to better reward the staff within it and to raise standards in care homes are the two most important priorities now. For the Government to flunk them both would be hard to forgive.
‘A Government NHS staff thought had changed has reverted to type’