Comment EDITOR’S COMMENTwith LOUISE FRAMPTON THE CLINICAL SERVICES JOURNAL Editor


Louise Frampton louiseframpton@stepcomms.com


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The NHS crisis: the human cost behind the latest figures


The latest NHS performance figures lay bare the extent of the crisis facing the NHS and they are truly shocking. Patients are waiting more than an hour and a half on average for an ambulance when they have a condition like a stroke or heart attack. Even when they get to hospital, nearly 55,000 people are stuck in A&E on trolleys waiting more than 12 hours.


Commenting on the figures, The King’s Fund said: “A&E performance is the worst it has ever been and not a single NHS Trust in the country is managing to meet the national target to be seen within four hours.” The King’s Fund added that waiting times can be reduced, as seen in the early 2000s, “if services have a clear focus and the right levels of investment and staffing. Without these conditions, it is unlikely that sustained pressures across the system will ease.” Nuffield Trust’s deputy director of research, Sarah Scobie, commented: “The NHS should be on a journey to recovery, but these figures lay bare the reality: this is a crisis of health service resilience, years in the making and the result of poor political choices and underinvestment… Bed occupancy has been running at unsafe and high levels throughout the winter, and long before the pandemic. “Running hospitals this hot leaves them vulnerable to the types of demand spikes we have


seen. Funding to support efforts to empty beds and get people into more appropriate care outside of hospital came too late. It is no wonder NHS staff will be struggling to juggle so many demands with so little space.” Dr. Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “How far does


Emergency Department performance need to fall for this to lead to meaningful action?” He added: “This crisis was foreseeable. The target of seeing 95% of patients within four- hours at Type 1 Emergency Departments has not been met since June 2013. A decade of underfunding, under-resourcing, and a failure to fulfil workforce pledges or commit to long- term workforce planning that tackled the retention crisis has led us to a broken system that does not perform its central function.” The Government needs to listen and take action. The £200 million investment in social care is a good start, but this is a crisis that has been years in the making. Tim Gardner, senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation, points out: “The data show the NHS is facing an emergency but the roots of this lie in political choices made over the last decade, not the cold weather or seasonal flu...There are no quick fixes – if the Prime Minister wants to live up to his promise to cut waiting lists without tricks or ambiguity, the first step is, to be honest with the public about the scale of the crisis and what it will take to get the NHS back on track. The pressures on the NHS result from a decade of underinvestment in the NHS and other public services, a failure to address chronic staff shortages, raiding capital budgets and the longstanding neglect of adult social care.” It will require long-term investment and strategic workforce planning to fix this crisis. We


know that waiting times can be reduced with adequate investment, the right levels of staffing, and by listening to clinical leads. The crisis cannot be fixed overnight; it can be fixed, but only if there is the political will. Ultimately, behind these performance figures are patients left in pain, unnecessary suffering and lives lost. According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, as many as 500 people could be dying each week because of delays to emergency care. These are not just statistics – these are mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters, whose lives have been cut short. This is the human cost of a decade of underinvestment in health and social care. The Government must act now or risk further lives.


louiseframpton@stepcomms.com Get in touch and give us your views, email me:


February 2023 I www.clinicalservicesjournal.com 5


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