SURVIVAL OF THE NHS? LET US PRAY…
With the NHS stretched like never before, Ivor Campbell, Managing Director of Snedden Campbell, a search company for the medical technology industry, gives SP his opinion on how it can survive…
the faith of the population is being tested like never before.
I
With budgets already stretched before the COCVID-19 pandemic, additional cost pressures since heaped on health boards across the country by double-digit inflation have 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. 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.
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scottishpharmacist.com
t’s often said that the National Health Service (NHS) is the closest thing Britain has to a unifying religion. If that is the case, then
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 – until now.
This week it was reported that NHS chief executives in Scotland – one of four autonomous health service areas in the UK – have discussed abandoning its founding principles by having wealthier patients pay for treatment.
The prospect of the first ‘two-tier’ health service in the UK since its founding in 1948 is raised in draft minutes of a meeting of NHS Scotland health board leaders in September. They also discussed the possibility of curtailing some free prescriptions.
While Humza Yousaf, Scotland's Health Secretary, sought to play down the reports – insisting NHS Scotland would stay publicly owned and operated and free at the point of delivery - the reports represent something of a watershed.
Yousaf’s comments were only to be expected. 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.
Yet, there is a dynamic to the latest spot in which the NHS finds itself, which appears materially different to anything in the past. Again, you need only scroll through some of the local press articles to discover that waits are longer, levels of
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