VOTE2019 NHS ‘They don’t belie


As Dominic Cummings says – and as the experience of millions shows – the Tories just don’t believe in the NHS


In April, a mum awaiting an emergency operation was forced to endure 31 hours in a hospital corridor as her abscess ruptured, sending her into agonising pain.


Also in April, a pensioner died from a cardiac arrest after a six-hour trolley wait – an inquest in August found the wait may have contributed to his death.


And more recently in October, an elderly woman, suffering from cancer, was rushed to hospital, only to wait 14 hours in an overcrowded hallway for blood tests.


These aren’t scenes from underfunded hospitals in war-torn countries – these are tales straight from our own NHS A&Es, in Lincoln, in Worcestershire, in Shrewsbury. And they aren’t limited to certain trusts, or areas.


So-called ‘corridor patients’ are facing the longest ever wait times since records began, with more than 60,000 people waiting more than four hours to be admitted in the six months to September – and it’s only the beginning as the NHS gears up for what is expected to be one of the coldest winters in decades.


The NHS in England will reportedly need 6,000 beds this winter simply to keep up with demand, according to research from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. But what’s framed every year as a one-off ‘winter crisis’ has been nine years in the making – with successive cuts to funding, all under Tory-led governments, having a snowball effect.


“The worst wait times on record don’t just happen in a vacuum – they’re the result of


a combination of government failures, from chronically underfunding the NHS to failing to take action amid an alarming recruitment and retention crisis,” explained Unite national officer for health Colenzo Jarrett-Thorpe.


This staffing crisis is nowhere more glaring than in nursing, where vacancies have ballooned to more than 40,000. The steep fall in nurse numbers has been attributed in large part to the Tories’ scrapping of the nursing bursary, which gave students a route into the profession without the prospect of taking on debt.


And just as recruitment has suffered under Tory reign, so too has retention – since 2011, an astounding 200,000 nurses have quit the profession, with three-quarters leaving before retirement age.


Alarming effect


The severe shortage in nursing staff has had an alarming effect on patient care – one analysis found that nurses who worked shifts with less than half of registered nurses than planned were twice as likely to report compromised care.


Even though a petition calling for the government to bring back the nursing bursary garnered tens of thousands of signatures, the government confirmed last year it had no intention of reinstating it.


Those left wondering what the Tories’ plans are now for the NHS may be tempted to look at their campaign promises. But at the same time as prime minister Boris Johnson vaguely pledged funding for new hospitals, a leaked memo from Tory HQ instructed candidates to not


20 uniteWORKS Winter 2019


sign up to any campaign pledges on protecting the NHS from foreign trade deals.


And only days before, Channel Four’s Dispatches report revealed that the government had in fact held secret meetings about NHS drug prices with US pharmaceutical firms – which have long vied to force the NHS to pay higher prices on US drugs.


The programme discovered that there had been six initial meetings, with British trade officials warning that the subject of ‘drug pricing’ was so sensitive, they should use the term ‘valuing innovation’ instead.


Unite’s Colenzo Jarrett-Thorpe warned that “despite Johnson insisting that the NHS would not be on the table in any trade negotiations with the US, these revelations demonstrate that the prime minister and his cronies are planning to do just that.


“Johnson is inherently dishonest and cannot be trusted with the NHS.” And it’s not only Unite who have warned against the Tories’ intentions with the NHS.


Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s own special adviser, put it most succinctly in comments he made at a conference in 2017. “I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct,” he said.


“Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.”


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