COLUMNIST

THE past few weeks have put a tremendous strain on our NHS, but also highlighted the professionalism and extreme dedication by its most valuable resource, the staff.

We saw the heroic efforts and dedication of NHS staff to ensure that Arctic temperatures and blizzard-like snowfall did not affect the NHS’ ability to look after patients.

Our amazing NHS staff don’t just go above and beyond when bad weather hits, they are doing it day in, day out – but those efforts don’t often hit the news.

The sad truth is, we simply do not have enough staff in order to meet the demands on health and care services.

We don’t have enough GPs, enough orthopedic surgeons, enough consultant psychiatrists or enough emergency medicine consultants to name just a few.

But it’s not just doctors – we are also short of nurses, speech and language therapists, and a whole host of allied health professionals.

Demand on the NHS is increasing, putting staff under immense pressures and having an impact on patients.

If we take cancer care, for example, a shortage of diagnostic staff has resulted in a failure to meet treatment targets since 2008.

We are not diagnosing patients early enough – only 52% of patients are diagnosed before the cancer has spread.

Wales will see the introduction of new sensitive screening for bowel cancer next year.

The FIT test is much more sensitive that the existing test, meaning it will pick up more bowel cancers.

Unfortunately, the sensitivity will be set much lower than that in Scotland because Wales doesn’t have enough capacity in endoscopy.

There are already lengthy waits for endoscopy patients, with around 4,500 patients waiting more than eight weeks and nearly a thousand waiting for more than half a year.

If we are to improve early diagnosis of cancer and other health problems, then we need to eliminate waits for endoscopy. This means training more endoscopists.

We have been really bad at workforce planning and I hope that the creation of Health Education and Improvement Wales will address that.

Wales needs to plan for the future, otherwise the shortages we see today will be much worse as our population ages.

We have to encourage more young people to become health professionals, whether that’s becoming a doctor or a nurse, an endoscopist or radiographer.

The curriculum needs to focus on STEM subjects and we have to incentivise young people into becoming health professionals.

We addressed teaching shortages by paying off the student debt of those entering teaching in some subjects – we should be offering similar incentives, including paying tuition fees, to encourage young people to train to work in our NHS.

If we don’t invest in our future, then our NHS won’t have a future. Caroline Jones AM is Ukip’s health spokeswoman