HOSPITALS & HEALTHCARE FACILITIES
A SYSTEM ON ITS KNEES
Praying for the survival of the NHS will not be enough to save it, exclaims Ivor Campbell, Managing Director of Snedden Campbell, as he analyses the current state of the National Health Service.
It’s often said that the National Health Service is the closest thing Britain has to a unifying religion. If that is the case, then the faith of the population is being tested like never before.
With budgets already stretched before the Covid pandemic, the additional cost pressures since heaped on health trusts across the country by double digit inflation has brought the NHS closer to breaking point than at any time in its history.
Every passing day seems to bring bleaker news for the beleaguered service, with a seemingly endless rollcall of damning statistics and publication of official reports charting yet higher levels of institutional failure.
If anything, the relentless flow of anecdotes of patient betrayal, breathlessly reported in the pages of local press, is more shocking.
In the past couple of weeks we learned that four patients had waited more than 20 hours in the back of ambulances outside Royal Shrewsbury Hospital; that GPs in Peterborough are now responsible for the care of more than 2,000 patients each; and that Stockport NHS Foundation Trust is offering food bank vouchers to hospital workers struggling to get by on poverty wages.
In the same week a British Medical Association (BMA) survey found that 44% of senior doctors are planning to leave their roles ‘in some capacity’ over the next
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12 months, while the Care Quality Commission (CQC) reported 132,000 NHS and 165,000 social care vacancies, meaning a workforce the size of the population of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne is needed to fix the logjam.
Meanwhile, the average wait for category two, 999 calls for an ambulance — including for chest pains and strokes — in England and Wales is now 60 minutes, compared with a target of 18 minutes. And in Scotland, throughout August, one in ten operations was cancelled due to lack of resources.
Of course, none of this is likely to lead to any significant change – at least not in the short-term. Traditionally, the response of politicians to complaints of a ‘crisis’ in the NHS has been to throw more money at it, and right now there’s no money to spare.
While both Conservative and Labour governments have previously toyed with reform, none has dared challenge the universally free, taxpayer-funded model upon which the health service was founded.
If there is a single, immutable reality of British political life it is that the NHS is an untouchable shibboleth, and any party that says otherwise risks courting electoral oblivion.
Even if there was a prime minister mad, or drunk, enough to suggest privatising the service, they would surpass the ends of the earth several times over before finding a private operator madder, or drunker, enough to take-on the job.
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