Hunt plan is all in vein

HEALTH Secretary Jeremy Hunt had a long case list this week. The NHS is short of 40,000 nurses, because demoralised and exhausted professionals are quitting in droves. “The NHS is being dragged down by the worst nursing shortage in its history,” warned RCN boss Janet Davies.“The stakes could scarcely be higher.” Macmillan Cancer Support revealed sufferers are being forced to go to A&E because they can’t get GP appointments. Then figures revealed the Tories spent £ 21million hiring consultants to slash NHS budgets and senior managers have had 15 per cent salary hikes since 2010 while nurses’ pay has fallen 14 per cent in real terms. But as those nurses marched on Westminster demanding their pay cap be lifted, Hunt’s boss Theresa May dismissed them snootily as “this, that and the other”. So, what was your top priority with that little lot on your desk, Jeremy? Ah yes, your “initiative focused on reducing prescribing and medication errors.” Hunt says one in 12 treatments doled out by doctors contains mistakes and a million hospital admissions a year may be due to medication mix-ups.

So he wants electronic prescribing and a “proactive safety- centred culture around medication”. It’s a serious issue, of course. But in the big scheme of things it’s a bit like putting a corn plaster on the slashed and spurting jugular vein of our dying NHS.

And l ast year Hunt slashed £ 200million from community pharmacies – those places where highlytrained staff pick up on prescription errors, or give you advice so you don’t have to trouble your overstretched GP at all. A quarter of High Street chemists and 19,000 jobs will have gone by the end of next year.

The Royal College of GPs doesn’t think much of Hunt’s diversionary tactics either.

Chairwoman Helen Stokes-Lampard thinks he’s blaming doctors and not “the intense resource and workforce pressures meaning workloads are often unsafe.

“We would certainly welcome innovative solutions,” she says, “but what we really need is a properly funded NHS.”

And a Health Secretary who can get his bloody priorities right.