How many more winters can NHS last?

PATIENTS lie on floors waiting for treatment. Ambulances line up outside crammed hospitals, unable to unload their patients. Politicians demand simple solutions, involving the spending of money that does not exist. Welcome to yet another NHS winter crisis.

If noisily worshipping the National Health Service made it better, or pouring cash into it solved its difficulties, we would by now have the best medical treatment in the world.

But the NHS remains a deeply imperfect organisation, in which thousands of superb and dedicated staff struggle against inefficiency, poor planning and bureaucracy.

If you doubt the extent of this problem, look at the vivid and disturbing account we reveal today, by a senior Scottish nurse, of the overcrowding and staff shortages in the hospital where she works, likening it to ‘Hell on Earth’.

Some of its problems would certainly be solved by money. Our swelling population is placing an intolerable load on its diminishing tally of hospital beds.

The growing number of Britons living far longer than they used to, a triumph partly achieved by better healthcare, has also created special problems.

But money will not overcome the mismanagement and inflexibility still common in its antiquated structure.

The NHS was designed for a population of manual workers who had been made ill and prematurely old by their jobs, by slum housing and by poor nutrition.

Now it must cope instead with millions of well-housed sedentary workers who eat too much and exercise too little.

But the necessary reforms would be denounced as plans to privatise the NHS, the Left’s unvarying cry.

Is it therefore time for a cross-party review, which puts the health of Scots above political point-scoring, and unflinchingly addresses the complex challenges our NHS faces, while staying true to its original purpose as envisaged by its idealistic founder, Nye Bevan?

That purpose is to ensure that all may have access to the very best medical treatment, regardless of income, when they need it. It is not doing this now and, if it is not taken firmly in hand, it will be even worse in future.

Further neglect and indecision will eventually lead to a two-tier health system in this country, the very thing the Left claims to fear.

Many more winters like this – and the NHS itself will need an ambulance.