The NHS needs to up its game
This newspaper has been inundated with letters regarding deferred or cancelled hospital treatments, some of them truly tragic. It is estimated that there are 15.3 million people currently waiting for an NHS appointment; over 50,000 have been waiting for more than a year. This week we reported the case of Adrian Rogers, 46, who was told in February that chemotherapy had reduced his bowel cancer to an operable state, and surgery was scheduled for April. It was cancelled when the pandemic hit. Mr Rogers has now been told that his tumours have swelled and his cancer is terminal.
At the beginning of the pandemic, our columnist Charles Moore observed that the NHS was no longer working for Britain, Britain was now working for the NHS. The desire to protect it, even from its own patients, has distorted its mission. Patients have even stayed away by choice because they do not want to be a burden, an attitude that is admirable, rather British, but has not been reciprocated by a winning effort to maintain a two-stream NHS.
Significant progress has been made to separate Covid patients from the rest, but it is obvious that the NHS is not running as close to capacity as it should. Instead, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons says that most surgeons are still doing around half their normal work. The number of cancer tests performed in April was less than half the figure at the same time last year.
GP surgeries have been trying to keep patients at a safe distance with an increased use of the telephone and internet – and this can save a lot of time, and many people like it. But for older patients, an online appointment is not always an option, and some problems are best diagnosed face-to-face.
There is also a pastoral dimension to medicine that the NHS risks losing while it is on a warfooting. The notion of a “family doctor” might sound like an antiquated ideal to health care bureaucrats, but an NHS that avoids contact with patients – even seems scared of them – must not become the new normal.
The coronavirus has been an exceptional challenge for the health service. Patients understand that, and they appreciate the remarkable dedication and kindness shown by its frontline staff. But the crisis has also identified and exacerbated the flaws of the system, with results that have sometimes been far from compassionate.