Time for difficult decisions

THE army of locum doctors helping prop up our health service clearly doesn’t come cheap.

But don’t mistake the eye-watering sums handed over to private recruitment firms as the problem. This lucrative cottage industry is a symptom of a wider crisis gripping the NHS.

Demand is outstripping supply.

The NHS, thankfully and possibly miraculously, remains free at the point of delivery – as founder Nye Bevan intended.

But what we want our health service to do today is light years away from what it was set up to do.

Brilliant but expensive advances in medicine and technology are colliding with insatiable public demand, fuelled by an ageing population.

Our health boards simply don’t have enough money to do everything and, realistically, our public finances can’t solve this unless we make huge sacrifices elsewhere.

They don’t have enough money to fill all the consultancy vacancies and they don’t have the cash to maintain an NHS infrastructure which is more suited to 1948 than 2017.

This means the time for making difficult decisions has arrived.

Lightburn Hospital in Glasgow, which provides rehabilitative care for older patients, was earmarked for closure this month, despite local protests.

NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde said it no longer fitted with modern healthcare and we can expect more local hospitals to go the same way in the coming years.

But what will jar with some is that this is the same health board which spent nearly £1m on two locum doctors for 15 months’ work.

Difficult decisions are now unavoidable for the NHS but so is actually squeezing every last bit of value out of every taxpayer pound.