84% surge in patients going private as NHS ‘disintegrates’
SOARING numbers of patients are scrambling to fund private healthcare as the NHS ‘disintegrates’ under the SNP, it was warned last night.
The number of patients going private for operations and medical treatment rose by 84 per cent between 2019 and 2021, while NHS Scotland waiting times ‘spiralled out of control’.
In the final three months of 2019, there were 2,740 patients paying to go private rather than sit on NHS Scotland waiting lists, but it had risen to 5,035 in the final three months of 2021.
At the same time, an A&E waiting time crisis has seen more than twothirds of patients waiting longer than four hours to be seen, admitpeople ted, treated or discharged.
And almost a quarter of patients with an urgent suspicion of cancer are waiting longer than the 62-day target for their first treatment.
Labour MSP Alex Rowley said: ‘Every week I hear from people in pain and discomfort and stuck on NHS waiting lists. When it comes to our NHS, the Government is incompetent.’
Figures from the Private Healthcare Information Network showed that in Scotland paid £15.8million for cataract, hip and knee operations last year – up from £9.4million two years earlier.
Earlier this week, Health Secretary Humza Yousaf announced £10million would be spent to improve cancer waiting times. A target that 95 per cent of patients wait no longer than 62 days from referral to the start of their treatment has been met only once, in the final quarter of 2012.
The latest NHS Scotland figures show that, for the first quarter of this year, a record low 76.9 per cent of patients began treatment in that target.
Scottish Conservative public health spokesman Tess White said: ‘Humza Yousaf’s flimsy NHS Recovery Plan is not fit for purpose.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘We have introduced new targets to address the backlog. We are working with NHS Boards to maximise capacity to meet these targets.’
KEITH WATERHOUSE, columnist, author, playwright, late of this parish, is best remembered for his brilliant Billy Liar, Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, and his twice-weekly musings on the madness of modern life.
Back in 1978, Keith published a novel called Office Life, a satire on the state of Britain in the 1970s. It centred on a fictitious company where everybody appears to be busy doing nothing. A newly hired employee sets out to discover what the firm actually does, while the staff are sitting in endless meetings, not answering phones, going for lunch, organising whip-rounds and suchlike.
Turns out the answer is, er, absolutely bugger all. The entire purpose of British Albion Ltd is keeping people employed.
Back in the Seventies Keith’s novel was seen as a sharp commentary on a nation in terminal decline. Today, it could be a template for just about every avenue of Government endeavour. Waterhouse had never heard of Human Resources, diversity leaders or wellness co-ordinators, let alone Working From Home. But if he’d been writing Office Life now, the book would have been full of them.
I can only assume that whoever is running Whitehall keeps a copy by the bed. Just about every single area of alleged public service is built around the convenience of the people who work there.
It is now an article of faith that the interests of the staff must come before those of the taxpayers they are employed to serve.
Take the NHS. And let’s get the caveat out of the way first. The health service has countless dedicated front-line doctors, nurses, paramedics, porters and receptionists doing their very best in difficult circumstances. In most cases, overworked and underpaid.
But the Soviet-style bureaucracy exists on another planet. They look on the NHS as a glorified job creation scheme, there not to treat patients but to mollycoddle its everexpanding army of managers and keep them well remunerated in the style to which they would like to become accustomed.
It was utterly predictable that the emergency £12billion pumped into the health service to clear the backlog caused by Covid would disappear down a black hole.
Instead of going straight into reinforcing A&E or hiring more nurses, most of the money has been swallowed up by bureaucrats to expand their empires. For instance, Mail Online’s John Ely has just discovered that despite constantly pleading poverty the NHS is still splashing out on hiring even more superfluous diversity and inclusion officers, whatever they are.
DONCASTER and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals is advertising for a ‘Head of Leadership, Equality Diversity and Inclusion and Wellbeing’ on the thick end of £76,000 a year — almost triple the starting salary of a junior doctor. Why? Apparently, this vital job involves: ‘Working with senior leaders to be a forward-thinking and inclusive people-centred employer which embraces and values diversity, difference and lived experience’.
What does that even mean? And when you’re being put on hold for hours trying unsuccessfully to get an appointment to see your GP sometime in the next millennium, and suffering in silence because your hip operation has been postponed yet again, who cares?
In Surrey, they’re also anxious to recruit an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead on 53 grand, plus an extra five per cent supplement on account of having to live in a high-cost part of the country.
But then the advert goes on to say that flexible working from home will be encouraged. So why would you need a top-up? Presumably to pay for all those Hobnobs and your Netflix subscription.
The successful candidate will: ‘Act as champion, ensuring that developments across the system take equality issues into consideration as part of their everyday work and that individuals feel safe and supported in expressing their diversity’.
Who writes this stuff: Bill and Ben The Flowerpot Men?
No mention, naturally, of making sure patients feel ‘safe’ knowing that they might actually get to see a doctor before they die screaming and kicking in agony.
Elsewhere, thanks to columnist Mary Wakefield writing in this week’s Spectator magazine, we learn that the London Ambulance Service has launched a series of ‘kindness workshops’ for staff run by a private company, who aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Let’s agree that the ambulance service is under great pressure. But surely what it needs is more ambulances, more ambulance drivers, more staff in A&E and more people answering 999 calls. Not a soppy programme of happyclappy New Age seminars run by a quack consultancy in thrall to American West Coast notions of wellbeing at work.
Who’s answering the phone or responding to emergencies while staff are attending these sessions?
The outfit responsible for this nonsense, called A Kind Life, has run courses like this for 35,000 NHS staff, all paid for out of our taxes. Nice work if you can get it.
Yet while NHS staff are being taught to ‘be kind’ to themselves and bureaucrats are busy expanding their empires with ever more yuman resources, diversity and inclusion specialists, seriously ill people the health service was set up to treat are, quite literally, dying for lack of care and attention.
There’s a nationwide cancer crisis, with leading oncologist Professor Karol Sikora warning yesterday of tens of thousands of premature deaths.
Meanwhile, most people can’t get a doctor’s appointment for love nor money. Since Covid, the majority of GPs have decided they’d rather work part-time, work from home or not work at all.
Once again this is the inevitable consequence of the New Labour cultural revolution, which began 25 years ago and has wrecked most of our institutions from the police to the Passport Office.
The NHS has never properly recovered from Blair giving GPs a huge pay rise while simultaneously relieving them of the obligation to work out-of-hours or at weekends. Shamefully, the last three Tory governments have failed to reform the NHS, preferring to shovel money at it without asking for anything in return.
Boris Johnson’s mawkish, saucepan-banging, sentimental weekly doorstep celebration of our risible ‘world-class’ health service was a national embarrassment.
The extra no-questions-asked £12 billion he and Dishy Rishi pumped into the NHS a few months ago has, with depressing predictability, been squandered on pay rises and recruitment.
We’re crying out for more medical staff, but instead for our money we get utterly useless diversity officers, inclusion wallahs and kindness courses.
Waterhouse’s British Albion Ltd is alive and well.
Which is more than can be said for the NHS.