Forget all the trivial distractions.
Dr Hilary Jones on Good Morning Britain, summing up the opinions of thousands of doctors' messages: "If it doesn't change very quickly, the NHS is finished. It's not sustainable. It's going to collapse."
British Medical Association and doctors say it's "delusional" and "incompetent" of Rishi Sunak to say NHS isn't in crisis. 13 years of Conservative anti-NHS ideology, underfunding, neglect and mismanagement. A publicly funded universal healthcare institution that's been around since 1948, flushed down the toilet in the name of a hard-right market fundamentalist ideology. Can't be allowed to happen.
Hope people don't mind another NHS privatisation story. I guess you can take it or leave it, but it's an interesting one...
There have been public protests (and thousands of complaint letters) over plans for a large profit-making private company (SSP Health) to take over an NHS community surgery in Lancashire. To quote one of the people campaigning (Louise France), "our GP has spent over £35,000 of her own savings trying to stop the take-over of our independent local surgery by a profit based private company", and the "lack of any public consultation is against the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board’s own guidelines".
A piece in UK's 'i' newspaper says:
"Thousands of patients at a rural GP surgery in Lancashire are fighting to prevent its takeover by a large private health firm in a David v Goliath battle that doctors fear will have national implications for the NHS.
"The dispute over who runs Withnell Health Centre (WHC), in a village near Chorley, is being seen as a watershed moment in the future of primary care. Doctors’ Association UK told 'i' the row highlights a trend among health officials that “bigger is better” when it comes to general practice, to the detriment of patients..
“The patients were absolutely gobsmacked – and angry – at the result. They had no idea this was going on and had no real chance to give any feedback on the matter,” Dr Robinson told 'i'." (i link, free registration required).
(Other news: PM Rishi Sunak invited seven private health bosses to NHS crisis meeting).
A very complex issue. People living longer, more hugely costly treatments available which people expect etc etc
Labour under Blair/Brown did what no Tory Govt dared to do, bring the private centre into the NHS. Yes Labour not the Tories did this in 2003. maybe a good initiative, maybe not. Something Thatcher never dared do.
Certainly other countries with apparently decent health systems (the nordic countries for example) do involve the private sector. A good thing or not?
Whenever the Tories announce a wish to reform the NHS everyone screams. But it clearly needs reforming. And maybe throwing cash at it isnt the answer?
We all read about ‘to much beurocracy‘. But how do you deal with that? Make people redundant? Would the Unions agree to that?
Looking forward to seeing the Labour proposals which, i assume, are nothing to with privatisation or simply increasing budgets , (though that is needed).
Challenging times!
Perhaps not as stimulating to read as lurid tabloid accounts of killer migrants or woke lunies, but a good summary of the facts/figures on the real reasons for the collapse of the NHS. From Will Hutton in today's Observer:
NHS crisis is the deadly legacy of austerity
Excess deaths are the highest in 70 years. Everyone outside the Conservative party knows the cause – 13 years of underinvestment
Will Hutton - The Observer Sun 15 Jan 2023
Labour kills. If the Tories were in opposition and Labour presiding over the scale of the current NHS emergency, Lynton Crosby, serial political strategy adviser to the Conservative party, would be merciless. His team would want the Tories relentlessly to pin the excess death toll on Labour. Boris Johnson, as leader of that opposition, would turn up the emotional amperage shamelessly. The needlessly dead in crowded A&E departments, hospital corridors or after long ambulance waits, courtesy of 13 years of Labour neglect and mismanagement, would be chronicled in excoriating detail by the rightwing media. The public would be enraged.
And the public would be right. But it is a Conservative government, media outrage is limited and the public has not turned vengeful. Certainly, it supports striking health workers. Yet so far the link between the 600,000 people who last October and November waited four hours or more in A&E before treatment, and death rates above past averages, is largely the province of statisticians and health experts. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) estimates that the current excess death rate is “roughly” between 300 and 500 a week, a claim disputed by both the NHS and the prime minister; be “careful about bandying around such numbers”, Rishi Sunak says, refusing to acknowledge that the NHS is in crisis. His caution is understandable: the Tory party is in danger of being labelled the death party.
Experts differ on the exact numbers, but not the fact that waiting times beyond four hours in A&E cause deaths. An article in the Emergency Medicine Journal last year, using data from 2016 to 2018, found that a wait of six to eight hours in A&E increased the rate of death by 1.7 percentage points. The Economist has built its own model and finds similar results: between August and November it suggests that 325 people a week were dying because of longer waiting times. Stuart McDonald, who specialises in health analytics at LCP, told Radio 4 last week that focusing on October and November – and assuming that those who waited more than 12 hours were slightly more likely to die given the longer wait – excess deaths were running at 415 people a week. The RCEM’s rough estimate is surely right.
And that is just what is happening in A&E. England is short of 4,200 GPs, so that the government’s 2019 target of having 6,000 more GPs by 2024 is now impossible – and has been quietly dropped. But the GP crisis, too, is having an impact. The Times calculates that over 2022 as a whole, excess deaths from all causes were 51,159 above the pre-Covid five-year average – the highest rate for 70 years. Yes, there should be adjustments for Covid and Britain’s ageing population but, even allowing for that, the 2022 death rate was abnormally high. The root cause is a failing NHS and care system – GPs to A&E to social care.
Nor is it difficult to understand why: the NHS has not the capacity, the equipment nor numbers of staff – 133,000 jobs are unfilled – that it needs. And everyone outside the Conservative party bubble knows the reason – 13 years of underinvestment and neglect in the name of shrinking the state to deliver illusory tax cuts. The health secretary, Stephen Barclay, is at pains to stress that health systems across Europe are under pressure from Covid, that extra investment is being made and refuses to accept austerity as a cause. In any case, he told the Today programme, former Labour chief secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne left a note on leaving office in 2010 that all the money had gone. The inference was the current crisis was Labour’s fault.
As a result, we do need to reassess austerity: when Labour left office, the NHS was in very good shape – A&E waiting times were a 10th of current levels. The former chancellor George Osborne now genially floats above the political fray as chair of the British Museum and a handsomely rewarded investment banker, saying that the country has nothing to fear from a Keir Starmer/Rachel Reeves-led government. But back in the day he was a party partisan above any other, feeding the Tory grassroots what they loved and aiming to succeed David Cameron as party leader. Indeed, that looked so certain that Johnson opted to outdo him and feed the faithful with even more of what they wanted – Brexit.
The Osborne-authored austerity of 2010-16 was not an economic necessity. The race to reduce the deficit beyond that allowed under previous Labour plans, with almost the entire burden placed on reducing public spending rather than raising taxes, was a political choice. It was informed by magical thinking: a shrunken state and lowering the tax “burden” would automatically create room for a reinvigorated private sector to drive growth – a more modest version of Trussonomics but from the same libertarian stable. It was, and is, nonsense. Markets are embedded in society; public agency and public spending are vital for capitalist vitality. The building blocks of any great economy are not tax cuts, but great organisations mobilising and energising their people around a shared purpose – and for which they need a network of supportive private and public institutions, including a great health service that keeps workforces healthy at work. It is a worldview foreign to today’s Conservative party. It does not understand the importance of great organisations, does not see its role as helping to build them and has no idea how to sustain one under its control, such as the NHS.
Osborne may think differently now but, by indulging magical thinking, he laid the foundations for today’s NHS collapse – too few beds, too few MRI scanners, too few GPs and pay rates allowed to fall woefully behind the private sector. It took 13 years for Labour to turn around the legacy after their election in 1997; it will take a similar period to repeat the task. In the meantime, the point has come to return fire, Crosby-style. Tory magical thinking has induced a structural crisis. Leaving the EU did not save the NHS; rather, it has helped induce its collapse. The economy is £120bn smaller and the tax take £40bn a year lower than it would have been had Brexit not happened. Overlay that with political choices and the message from the excess death rates is unambiguous. Tory policies kill.
_________________________________
And another newspaper article from today (Guardian, 15/1/2023) concludes as follows:
... What if you also have a government that has spent years obliterating the public health budget, which is intended to promote healthy lives and prevent illnesses that impose pressures on the NHS?
This is the British tragedy: a country left exposed to disaster because of the fatal conjoining of a broken economic system and an ideologically crazed government. This is a humanitarian crisis, and it should be framed as such. But as those bodies pile up in our mortuaries and funeral homes, remember this – it was all avoidable.
When in power, the Tories always lead an all-out assault on the NHS. It’s a long and ignoble Tory tradition which began when Churchill’s Conservative Party voted against the NHS’s creation a staggering 21 times.
The concept of a National Health Service is running sore for ideologues who can’t bear to see state-run services succeed. And since 2010 there have been 13 years of hurt. Pay cuts, underfunding, savage cuts to training. And encouragements for piranha-like private companies to snap up limbs and appendages.
The private sector has doubled its hold on the NHS. No wonder when so many Tory MPs benefit from donations from health-care companies and many even have second jobs with these firms. (Last March, Oluwole Kolade was made a deputy chair of NHS England. In just over a decade, Kolade has donated £859,342 to the Conservative Party. He also runs a private equity firm that specialises in health care.
Ros Wynne Jones
In recent years, Conservative governments have overseen a massive increase in NHS privatisation, with billions of pounds of contracts handed out to private providers. Meanwhile, waiting times in NHS hospitals are now at their worst level since records began.
Tory resentment for the NHS has been there from the beginning. To this day, the Tories resent the NHS. They don’t like that it is big, efficient and popular: it undermines their arguments that market methods are preferable to public service. They have tended to both underfund the NHS and to try break up state provision by handing as much of the NHS as possible to private firms. And if this wasn’t bad enough – top Tories have repeatedly tried to profit from privatisation of NHS services.
Solomon Hughes
The basic problem is that the Conservative party does not believe in the NHS but dares not say so. By underinvesting, making the jobs unrewarding and creating waiting lists, it hopes to encourage the public to turn to the private sector. The scandalous waste of money during the pandemic, and the party’s insistence on using the private sector for the failed test-and-trace system, which cost £37bn, when the NHS could have done a better job for much less money, is indicative of its ideological approach.
Wendy Savage
I've said it before, the government want the NHS to fail, so they have an excuse to sell it off.
@Tourist - No doubt these issues you raise (you say NHS leadership is "totally captured and taken over by far-left woke ideology") have some elements of truth, although the amounts you quote (£100,000 and £1M) spent on these matters (transgender, etc) seem miniscule relative to overall budgets. To put those figures in perspective, recall the £37 BILLION of taxpayers money that went into Dido Harding's failed test & trace contract. There's also the billions paid on forgotten & costly longterm PFI - Private Finance Initiative - contracts, etc, which continue to drain NHS funds. NHS trusts spent close to half a BILLION pounds on interest charges alone from private companies for PFI contracts last year – equivalent to the salaries of 15,000 newly qualified nurses.
When I put the blame primarily on hard-right ideology and influences, I'm not saying there's no blame elsewhere. I'm talking about who ultimately has an *interest* in the collapse of the NHS and privatisation of UK healthcare, and who is ultimately in control of the management and funding of the NHS. That's a Conservative government with increasingly rightwing policies over the last 13 years, increasingly funded and supported by (yes) hard-right market-fundamentalist individuals, groups and "thinktanks". This is quite well documented, as far as the ideology.
But I can see that the anti-woke thing is an important issue to many (including the editor of the Daily Mail, apparently), and I noticed Jon (Mayor of Dreamsville) "liking" your post - I'd sure like to hear his views in more detail! I'm sympathetic to that, but let's get it into perspective in terms of the actual sums of money and the relative degrees of influence and power.
The NHS has existed since 1948, and has survived all kinds of cultural and political upheaval, including various degrees of government incompetence, introduction of market-based elements (PFIs, etc), "political correctness gone mad" (which goes back a long way - I recall the Daily Mail ranting about its influence on the NHS in the 1980s), etc. But never has it been as much at risk as now.
It might be worth remembering NHS leadership and health chiefs have been totally captured and taken over by far-left woke ideology. NHS management is now completely obsessed with the EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) agenda, at the expense of trying to solve clinical failures, reduce waiting lists and times and reducing inefficiency and saving money, in fact this extreme-left 'woke' management is wasting huge sums of money, with an alarming degree of focus on race, gender and identity politics. As an example, senior health officials plan to spend £100,000 on a midwife training programme to improve care for pregnant transgender patients!!.Based on a (completely, obviously) flawed study by trans activists that claims men can give birth, the initiative encourages midwives to use terms including ‘chest-feeding’ and ‘human milk’....= pathetic........You couldn't make such shit up.
Another one is the NHS spending well over £1million on hundreds of 'woke' staff networks/groups. It has been estimated that it has taken around 36,000 hours of staff time a year to run events in these groups (109,000 hours of dedicated staff time in total), based around transgender issues, sexuality and racism, which included (apparently) sessions about pronouns, 'tea and rainbow cake' picnics and a Filipino martial arts show...WTF..... I would argue that the money and the time wasted on this charade could be far better used, and the actual true figure involved is very likely to be much higher as only around half of the total number of NHS trusts responded to Freedom of Information requests.
...My comment, one I believe is correct and true, is made to add a little balance to the always, 'it's all down to the hard-right' blinkered viewpoint, with little to zero acknowledgment of any blame being apportioned to the left.
Of course the government has lots to answer for, but it's not just a problem coming from the right.
More on this story:
"The NHS doesn’t need reform, it just needs to be sold-off,” is a phrase I have heard used at these private dinners: