HOSPITALS ON THE CRITICAL LIST

Insiders reveal the parlous state of the NHS...

WHEN it comes to the NHS, the first thing we should do at this time of year is offer a massive thank you to the doctors, nurses and staff in our hospitals who, despite huge pressures, are staffing wards and caring for patients.

The second thing is to listen to their concerns. When, as we report in today’s Mail on Sunday, a nurse describes the state of a major hospital in Scotland as ‘hell’ we should be listening very carefully indeed.

The medical staff I meet every week are, to a man and woman, dedicated to the NHS. For them to describe the institution they love in such terms is a massive wake-up call.

Most immediately, it demonstrates the depth of the winter crisis the NHS is facing this year. The warning bells have been ringing for some time.

In September, NHS chiefs and SNP Ministers were being told about the Australian and Hong Kong flu that was likely to hit the UK during the winter.

Combine that with the cold snap over Christmas and New Year – which was notably absent last year – and you end up with all the ingredients necessary for a full-blown red alert in wards across Scotland.

Some hospitals have been forced to ask office staff to help with cleaning. Health boards have postponed planned operations to free up beds. Others have placed patients in surgical beds because there is no space in medical wards.

Telephone and online service NHS 24 has seen the busiest Christmas and New Year period since it began 15 years ago.

It shows no signs of abating. This weekend, some GP practices are opening to try to ease the pressure on hospitals.

With the cold returning, we can expect to hear more stories emerging from within hospital corridors of endless waits and cancelled appointments.

The message will go out: do not visit an A&E department unless it is strictly necessary.

In truth, this crisis was waiting to happen. Speak to any doctor or nurse and they will tell you the system is always on the brink of falling apart, usually held together only because medical staff often go the extra mile to ensure patients are treated well. Take that goodwill away and the NHS would fall to pieces. What is remarkable is that the crises are the exception, not the norm.

All this is happening in what is a special year for the NHS. On July 5, we mark 70 years since its foundation in 1948. There is talk of events at Chelsea Flower Show and Wimbledon to mark the occasion.

Not for nothing is the National Health Service known as the closest thing the British have to a national religion.

YET, as we celebrate the past achievements of this remarkable institution, nobody can be under any illusions: never, in the seven decades since it began caring for patients in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has the NHS been under such pressure as it is now.

Money continues to be ploughed into the NHS every year. The UK Conservative Government has promised to increase spending by £8billion over the next five years. In Scotland, where responsibility for the NHS is entirely the SNP’s, we expect the Scottish Government to do likewise.

But it is still not enough. Our ageing population is putting huge additional strain on hospitals. We need to see not just extra money but also better management if the service we love is to prosper and continue.

With the NHS in all parts of the UK faltering under the strain, that applies no matter where you live. But all too often, all we hear from the SNP is a blunt insistence that, thanks to its leadership, everything is fine here and it doesn’t need any lessons from anyone else.

The result is that fresh ideas and bold reforms are shunned. Rather than tackle problems, the SNP denies they exist and cracks down on anyone who suggests something is wrong. We will only improve the NHS in Scotland if we accept we have a problem.

Lying behind the crisis this week is clear evidence that under the SNP the NHS in Scotland is suffering from serious, unresolved problems.

Take the epicentre of the current crisis: our A&E departments. Even before the Christmas period began, almost one in five patients were not being seen within the four-hour standard. In some hospitals – such as the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh – almost half of patients were waiting for more than four hours.

There are many reasons for this, but one glaring factor is the systematic failure of the SNP Government to invest properly in primary care and local GP clinics. Under the SNP, Scotland spends less of its health budget on local GPs than other parts of the UK.

This has led to a recruitment and retention crisis in GP practices across Scotland. The knock-on effects for the rest of the NHS have been severe.

AS Professor Graham Watt of Glasgow University said: ‘If general practice is systematically weakened – as has happened over the past decade – patients will flood through the gate, accessing out-of-hours A&E services or acute hospital admissions.’

This same bad management affects so many other parts of the NHS in Scotland too.

We see it in the growing numbers of patients who are well enough to leave hospital but cannot do so because of a lack of space in social care. We see it in the spiralling spend on agency staff – due to the fact Ministers have failed to ensure enough NHS staff are on call.

There is plenty of hope for the NHS as it marks its birthday this year. It is to be found in the fantastic staff who, every day, keep it going and ensure patients continue to get the best medical care, free at the point of use, anywhere in the world.

But this winter crisis is a reminder that the lions on the front line deserve better than to be led by donkeys.

When wards are described as ‘hell’ by frontline staff, Ministers and managers should act. Anything less would be a betrayal of the values on which our NHS was built.

All ingredients necessary for a full-blown red alert