Greater funding for the NHS required

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused massive challenges for hard-working NHS staff and worrying waits for both elective and urgent treatment.

The high level of Covid cases locally, with a 60 per cent increase in patients with Covid admitted to the RUH last week and many NHS staff being off sick with Covid, has meant relentless pressure on our healthcare services.

But the problems faced by the NHS existed long before Covid. The government professes to support the NHS and has previously said that it will ‘give the NHS whatever it needs.’

But a brief look at what Conservative-led governments have actually done since 2010 tells a different story.

From 2010 to 2019, the government cut the annual increase in NHS funding to 1.4 per cent, compared to an average increase of 3.7 per cent from 1948 to 2009.

In 2012 they passed the Health and Social Care Act, which brought costly competitive tendering of NHS contracts and widespread outsourcing of NHS services to profit-seeking private companies.

In 2016 Jeremy Hunt forced a fiercely contested and deeply unfair contract on junior hospital doctors, then in 2017 the government removed training bursaries for nursing and midwifery students.

Over the same decade, NHS pay has been constrained such that, with inflation, staff have effectively had significant pay cuts.

Add in a failure by government to develop a robust NHS workforce plan, plus the social care crisis, and the result is a dire lack of capacity and staff in both the NHS and social care.

It was reported at a recent B&NES Council health scrutiny panel that 27 per cent of people in RUH beds were fit for discharge but waiting for domiciliary care, while Bath Live reported this week that 18 ambulances were queuing to access the RUH Accident and Emergency Dept.

It is clear that the government must sustain higher levels of funding for the NHS and social care, providing more hospital and care facilities, plus better pay and conditions for both NHS and social care staff, to recruit and retain these essential key workers.

Paula Riseborough Bath