It’s no wonder the NHS makes so many blunders

The revelations in Tuesday’s Mail about the extent of the crisis within the NhS struck a cord with me.

It laid bare that more and more mistakes are being made by the NhS (there were three times more blunders last year than in 2005), and this is because of atrocious understaffing and cuts to front-line services.

My own speciality — patients with eating disorders — has the highest mortality rate of any mental health condition.

One in five people with an eating disorder dies from it, so any mistakes I make might have fatal consequences.

It is no exaggeration to say I live in fear. every evening, I run through all the patients I have seen to make sure that I haven’t missed anything.

My own stressful situation of budget cuts and constraints is far from unusual. Indeed, trusts up and down the country are facing similar predicaments. As posts are frozen or cut, existing staff have to step in and take on yet more work. Doctors and nurses do their best, but is it any wonder that mistakes are made?

For years, the NhS has plugged the gaps with locum doctors and agency nurses. however, in an attempt to address spiralling costs, the Government has insisted that the amount spent on locums and agency staff is reduced.

Thus, many trusts have fired the locums and there are gaping holes in services. Locums were a sticking plaster covering chronic under-investment; now the plaster has been ripped off, the festering wound underneath has been revealed.

But, as any surgeon will tell you, there comes a point when you need to open up a wound to expose it to the air. And this is what we need to do with the problems the NhS is experiencing.

I desperately hope that, with Brexit, we will be able to open up our borders to those with skills and training from outside the eU — much as we did in the Sixties and Seventies with doctors from India. But that alone certainly isn’t going to solve all the problems.

I strongly believe that our National health Service is the fairest and most effective way of delivering healthcare — but the current model simply can’t go on like this.

We urgently need a frank discussion about what we can and can’t expect from the NhS. If we want the current level of care, with the NhS providing everything we want from the cradle to the grave, then it requires more funding. It’s that simple.

It may be that we, as a nation, decide we don’t want that. Fair enough.

But then we’ll have to work out what we expect the state to fund and what individuals should pay for.

I doubt any politician is brave enough to put those two choices to the public, though. But we clearly need a re-think and fast, because the NhS is at breaking point. Doing nothing can’t be an option.