Prescription that can cure a sick system
PATIENTS lie on floors waiting for treatment. Ambulances l i ne up outside crammed hospitals, unable to unload their patients. Labour politicians demand simple solutions, involving the spending of money that does not exist. Welcome to yet another NHS winter crisis.
If noisily worshipping the NHS made it better, or pouring cash into it solved its difficulties, we would by now have the best medical treatment in the world. But it remains a deeply imperfect organisation, in which thousands of superb and dedicated staff struggle against inefficiency, poor planning and bureaucracy.
If you doubt the extent of this problem, look at the appalling case we reveal today of nurse Leona Harris, crazily disciplined because she was too busy saving a patient’s life to fill in a form.
Some of the NHS’s problems would certainly be solved by money. Our swelling population is placing an intolerable load on a diminishing tally of hospital beds. The growing number of Britons living far longer than they used to, a triumph partly achieved by better health care, has also created special problems.
But cash will not overcome the mismanagement and inflexibility still common in its antiquated structure. The NHS was designed for a population of manual workers who had been made ill and prematurely old by their jobs, by slum housing and by poor nutrition. Now it must cope instead with millions of well-housed sedentary workers who eat too much and exercise too little.
But the necessary reforms, if attempted by a Tory government, would be denounced by Labour as plans to privatise the NHS, the Left’s unvarying cry.
This is why there is much sense in Lord Saatchi’s call, in today’s Mail on Sunday, for a cross-party Royal Commission on the NHS, bound by its terms of reference to put country and people above party and faction.
Such a Royal Commission, given a stern time limit and powers to demand evidence on oath, could actually return the NHS to its original purpose as envisaged by its idealistic founder, Nye Bevan.
That purpose is to ensure that all may have access to the very best medical treatment, regardless of income, when they need it. It is not doing this now, and if it is not taken firmly in hand, it will be even worse in future.
Further neglect and indecision will eventually lead to a two-tier health system in this country, the very thing Labour claims to fear. Let us have a Royal Commission, and let us have it soon. Many more winters like this, and the NHS itself will need an ambulance.