The NHS works for its staff, not its patients

Mandatory jabs is merely the latest example of how the public loses out to the interests of health workers

It was an extraordinary admission. In an interview yesterday about the Government’s plans to delay the introduction of compulsory jabs for NHS staff until next year, Sarah Gorton, head of health workers at Unison, the union, said: “This isn’t about what’s right to do for patients, this is about what is the best way of increasing rates of vaccination across the NHS.”

Usually the health unions – and NHS leaders, for that matter – are a little more coy. For decades, many of us have looked at the NHS, the way it operates, and the service it tends to provide, and concluded it isn’t run in the interests of the patients, but rather the interests of its staff. It is rarely admitted.

But the evidence is everywhere. We all acknowledge that most frontline health staff have been under huge pressure during the pandemic, but we also know that lockdowns have taken a huge toll on the physical, mental and economic health of the nation. We locked down the country to “save the NHS”. Many of us had thought that the health service was there to save us.

Of course, it didn’t. To stop the NHS from collapsing, millions of non-covid patients were denied the treatment they needed, and we are now having to pay billions of pounds in extra tax to clear the backlog. Poor infection control also meant that the NHS did not save the thousands of people who died having caught Covid after being admitted to hospital: more than 11,000 – one in eight of all Covid deaths in hospital.

But even today, with the worst of the pandemic hopefully behind us, little seems to have changed. Take Gorton’s comments, and the issue of compulsory vaccinations for NHS staff. Around 100,000 of the people working in the health service are unjabbed, despite being one of the earliest groups offered the vaccine. Nearly a year later, it is remarkable that NHS managers have still been unable to persuade thousands of employees to take up the offer.

It is not as if this is an irrelevant matter. It is noticeable that some of the hospital trusts with the highest rates of hospital-acquired Covid deaths – such as University Hospitals Birmingham – also have among the highest proportion of unvaccinated staff. For patients using those hospitals, still worried that they might catch Covid while being treated for other conditions, this is far from reassuring.

Care homes, in contrast, have been told they must dismiss unvaccinated staff before the winter, to protect their residents. Why is the health service being treated differently? It seems NHS leaders would rather potentially increase the risk to patients than press their staff to get jabbed, for fear that they will walk away. Likewise, health unions have continued to resist compulsory vaccination – despite numerous consultations over the past year. Never mind that such inoculation would not only lower the risk of staff infecting patients, but also help limit the likelihood they will need to take time off with infection themselves.

Still, the NHS has been saved the trouble of a staff exodus, so you might think it would be pulling out all the stops so that it can get through a difficult winter, while ensuring the public gets the care it needs. It doesn’t appear so. This week the head of NHS England, Amanda Pritchard, sparked alarm when she asserted that the rate of hospital admissions for Covid had risen fourteen-fold since the same time last year. A quick look at the data showed this is far from being the case: admissions are much lower than last November. Her comparison was, in fact, between August this year and last year. It was a curious choice of data, and only heightens the suspicion that NHS chiefs would like us to feel so frightened of another wave of deaths that we will voluntarily stay at home and stop bothering the health service.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the NHS has us in thrall to its demands. For years it has been able to excuse its failings by complaining of austerity, despite absorbing an ever-increasing share of funds while other public services were cut back. Despite hiring huge numbers of managers, the health service has seemed unable to plan ahead, by increasing staffing and bed capacity in readiness for winter pressure.

The Government must share in the blame, for allowing the NHS to believe that, rather than face up to its failings, it has only to threaten collapse to be handed another wad of taxpayers’ cash. But isn’t it about time our NHS took as its starting point the needs of patients who are, after all, paying the bills?