Pay up and save the NHS Titanic

I WORKED in frontline NHS services for 40 years, and for at least the last 20 of these there was underfunding, understaffing and under-resourcing (“Our NHS is rising to the challenges”, Letters, February 19). The reasons include the much greater complexity of care and treatments available; increased survival of older people; and failure to train enough of our own doctors and nurses.

Most NHS staff pull out the stops to make patients’ care excellent and timeous, but are severely constrained by inadequate resources. While each government has promised “better care”, none has succeeded. While each claims a real-term increase in funding, this doesn’t cover the increasing cost of running our NHS, and year-on-year three to five per cent savings must be made by each health board. How do they make these savings? By trimming staff and resources. Successive governments claim “this won’t reduce the service, we’ll make the service more targeted and efficient”. This is code for “we can’t make it better, but we’ll try to pull the wool over your eyes”.

Why not take the NHS out of political hands? It has been used as a political football by every government, always to the detriment of care. Secondly, as one of the world’s wealthiest nations, only placing more of our relative wealth into our public services will allow the NHS to blossom. We should be willing to pay that cost by a significant increase in our taxes.

The trouble is, no political party is willing to propose this. Instead we tinker around at the margins while the NHS Titanic sinks further into the realms of poor care despite loyal, hard-working staff. I am glad Ruth Marr had such good care, but countless others have waited months, sometimes years for appointments or treatment. We must not pretend that “all is well”, for it is certainly not.