NHS UNDER PRESSURE
WE know the NHS has been systematically and scandalously starved of resources for years.
It lacks doctors, it lacks nurses, it lacks beds.
It’s not just the channel that separates us from our European neighbours, but a vast funding gap equating to 35,000 hospital beds or 10,000 doctors.
We’re being run ragged. A health service of gaps and stopgaps where two out of three juniors report holes in their rota and one third of GP practices have long-term vacancies. It’s the new norm. It’s a new low.
Does being prepared mean resorting to precipitously cancelling tens of thousands of operations before Christmas due to lack of capacity, adding further delay, anxiety and suffering to patients who’ve already waited months for an operation?
Is being prepared having 17,000 acutely sick patients queueing in ambulances outside emergency departments in the first week of January since there was not the space to admit them.
Do you remember when winter pressures only happened in the winter?
We now have an all-year crisis. We may be in the midst of summer, but in the NHS it’s still winter.
All this is inevitably affecting patient safety, with bed occupancy in some trusts running up to 100% – which is well above recom- mended safe limits of 85%.
Is it safe for patients who should be admitted in an emergency to suffer ambulance delays of several hours with some not surviving the wait as reported last winter?
Is it safe to work in an understaffed environment of perpetual rota gaps? Is it safe to manage patients in car parks because the hospital has no space, or to treat patients on trolleys in corridors rather than the facilities of a ward?
Is it safe for GPs to spend just 10 minutes with patients with four or more complex problems?
Five years on, three-quarters of doctors say that financial targets still override patient care, while the board agendas of NHS organisations across the UK remain obsessed with balancing unbalanceable books, when what they should be obsessed about is quality and safety.
The Prime Minister’s belated and desperately needed announcement of increased NHS funding after years of denial is a positive step.
But the investment is still well short of what’s needed and we need it now.
We will continue to campaign to be at parity with our European neighbours.
Meanwhile it’s crucial that this money is delivered to treat patients and attract and retain staff.
Given the taxpayer is being asked to contribute more, the Government has an equal moral imperative to stop wasting billions from current taxpay- ● ers pockets on the damaging NHS market in England – money which should be used to treat patients but being squandered in futile transactions, bureaucratic processes, fragmentation and PFI deals
Has Government forgotten private provider Circle abandoning Hinchingbrooke Hospital just three years after taking it over simply because it wasn’t profitable enough and leaving the NHS to pick up the pieces of disruption to services, staff and patients.
What more evidence does the Government need about the costs and damage of private outsourcing after the collapse of Carillion, and the utter shameful incompetence of Capita?