BY HAJERA BLAGG


The image of little Jack Newmanlying on a makeshift ‘bed’ of two chairs pushed together in a busy A&E has become the symbol of an NHS creaking under the weight of its worst winter in history.


More than four in 10 hospitals in England declared a major alert in the first week of the year, with bed shortages resulting in alarming “trolley waits”, where patients wait more than four hours to be seen.


This year’s unprecedented NHS winter pressures prompted the British Red Cross to call the situation a “humanitarian crisis”. Deaths after long trolley waits have even been reported – in Worcestershire Royal hospital, it is believed a woman died of a heart attack after waiting 35 hours to be seen in January.


The health service often feels the pressure over the winter but veteran health workers agree that the last few months are unlike anything they’ve ever seen.


The crisis, they say, is reaching the point of no return. But the government has decided to sweep the problem under the carpet, and has sought to blame the very health workers who’re keeping the service from totally falling apart.


Prime Minister Theresa May said in January that it was GPs who were to blame for added pressures on A&E because their doors weren’t open long enough.


But Doctors in Unite chair and North Lancashire GP Dr David Wrigley said that nothing could be further from the truth. GPs, he said, are working longer hours than ever before – he and his colleagues are regularly putting in 12 to 14 hour shifts.


“Year on year the workload has increased to the point that all of us are in a constant state of exhaustion,” he explained. “A typical day will start at 7.30 am and not end till 9.”


This workload isn’t only exhausting for doctors – it’s unsafe for patients. “Giving the correct diagnosis and care for our patients takes time; you need time to think,” he said. “But we just don’t have the resources.”


Wrigley says the central problem is lack of government funding and a mounting staff


shortage crisis in general practice. “Many current GPs are planning to retire early or leave the profession altogether the demands mean we can’t provide a safe, reliable service,” he said.


Having heard of the working conditions in general practice, young doctors are being dissuaded from entering the profession, creating a ‘perfect storm’ in recruitment and retention.


And another ‘perfect storm’ is brewing in social care, which is having devastating knock-on effects in A&E – elderly and disabled patients get stuck in hospital with nowhere to go because there’s no adequate care in the community.


Residential care homes are closing at record rates as local authorities’ budgets have been cut by 37 per cent since 2010, with a further 56 per cent cut planned by 2020.


Even though the government has permitted councils to hike council tax by 3 per cent this year and the year after to help pay for social care, this is nowhere near enough, Unite researcher James Lazou noted.


Massive funding cuts He highlights that local authorities reeling from massive funding cuts are now cutting all non-statutory services first, such as libraries, to pay for care. They’ve also massively reduced the number of people who are eligible for social care services.


“Even after taking these drastic measures, councils – including Tory councils – say they’re struggling to provide the bare minimum statutory services,” Lazou said.


Unite Greenwich Council branch secretary Danny Hoggan, who has been a care worker for adults with learning disabilities for nearly 30 years, says that the pressures are unprecedented.


And while the massive underfunding of social care is a central problem, Hoggan believes it is also the privatisation of social care that’s made the whole system dysfunctional.


“Even if you’ve dumped loads of money on social care, the problems won’t be fixed until you take the market out,” he said. “Care companies, motivated only by profit,


23 uniteWORKS Spring 2017


have created a race to the bottom in the quality of the service as well as the pay, terms and conditions of the workforce. “One in seven care workers are on zero hours contracts and many aren’t even paid the legal minimum wage.”


Things have got so bad that, just as in general practice,


recruitment crisis in social care, too.


And as more and more care services shut after private providers can’t secure a suitable return on investment, the elderly and vulnerable slip through the cracks and it falls on the beleaguered NHS to meet their needs.


An Age UK study estimated that the lack of suitable elderly care in the community has cost the NHS nearly £700m between 2010 and 2015, with many patients trapped in hospital as they wait for a care assessment, care home place, home care package or home adaptation.


Dr Wrigley warns that the health service is at the very end of its tether. “We need a strong coalition of patients and the NHS workforce getting together to tell the government, ‘enough is enough’ – before it’s too late,” he said.


And that’s exactly what Unite is now organising. “Unite is taking a many-sided approach,” explained Unite national officer for health Colenzo Jarret-Thorpe.


“We’re lobbying policymakers to demand adequate funding that the NHS and social care so desperately needs, to stop privatisation, and to create a truly integrated health and social care system so that no patient is left behind.


“We’re reaching out into communities across the country to expose what the government is doing to the health service – secretive sustainability and transformation plans (STPs), the latest privatisation of the NHS in England, is one example.”


“Most importantly, we’re defending our members, fighting for better pay, terms and conditions. We agree with a leading QC who said recently that the service is only working at all because of the ‘superhuman efforts’ of NHS staff – after years of pay freezes, they deserve much better.”


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