How much more can the NHS suffer before it expires? Should the life-support machine, which is itself getting timeworn, be turned off as an act of mercy? Is it too frail and broken to cope with modern-day demands?
There’s plenty of bad news thrown up daily to back up that claim of terminal decline. This week’s bulletins: the post-Covid waiting list for non-urgent cases is now 2.6 million; deaths of mothers during and just after pregnancy reached their highest levels for 20 years; the junior doctors’ strike “has led to unprecedented disruption for patients and their families”. Junior doctors in Wales have just started a three-day strike.
It’s hard, I know, but do not surrender to pessimism. These problems are not inevitable nor immutable. Unlike most patients who reach the point of no return, the NHS can be returned to robust health. But revival would be unpropitious for right-wingers who have been drawing its blood since 2010 and persuading the population that no amount of money can save the decrepit “old model”.
We, the majority, who treasure the NHS, need to become proactive, politicised and informed. Striking nurses and doctors did not create its ills. Blame Tory politicians for the NHS’s unending crises.
Last January, the Daily Mirror ran an exposé of Tory MPs and lords “shamelessly accepting money from private healthcare firms as the NHS is on its knees. Wealthy Conservatives and companies are profiting from the health service crisis. The troubling links come as the Government dishes out contracts to the private sector to tackle long NHS waiting lists.”
Last year, Henry Marsh, a neurosurgeon, told The Guardian: “The private health industry in the UK is flourishing because the NHS is withering. In 2022 private hospitals in the UK treated 820,000 patients – a new record. Between 2010 and 2021 the self-pay private health business doubled in value.” Lucky, lucky shareholders.
This Saturday, my husband and I went to a Wellcome Trust public event on the state of the NHS. One of the speakers was the children’s author and activist Micheal Rosen, who, in 2020, was in a Covid coma for 47 days. The other, my friend Gavin Francis, a Scottish GP and author of bestsellers on the human body. He was there to discuss his latest book, Free For All, Why the NHS is Worth Saving. It’s a corker.
The packed auditorium was filled with a sense of urgency by the two men. It felt like a revivalist meeting, only saner and wiser.
Aneurin Bevan wrote this in an open letter to medics when inaugurating the audacious new medical service from cradle to grave for all on these isles: “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means.” That is why the US cannot call itself a civilised nation, but the UK can. Or could till the privatisation parasites multiplied and started infecting it.
I accept there have been unforgivable NHS failures and scandals and cover-ups. Scrutiny and standards must improve. But detractors use these to damn the entire system. We know why.
Staffing is scandalously low, partly because staff are not paid what they are worth and partly because of manic anti-immigration policies. One junior doctor tells me South Africa would pay him more than the UK does after years of training and incredible hard work.
Then there is chronic underfunding. Whenever I say this on TV or radio, sneering opponents come back with: “They always want more. The problem is inefficiency.” It really isn’t. The UK spends less on public healthcare as a proportion of GDP than France or Germany.
So will Labour fix this? Between 1997 and 2010, Labour governments gave the NHS respect and the money it needed. Now, Wes Streeting wants the NHS to be “wide open” to the private sector. They call it “reform”. I call it betrayal and capitulation.
Francis’s final words in the book: “A health service free for all at the point of use, based on need rather than on demand, is an expression of what’s best in our society, and we’ll get the NHS we are prepared to insist on.”
Insist and mobilise now. Think of the founding idealists; think of future generations. Stop them turning off the NHS, our most valuable British institution.
Does Labour understand the perilous state of the NHS? Not really, no
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16.01.2024
How much more can the NHS suffer before it expires? Should the life-support machine, which is itself getting timeworn, be turned off as an act of mercy? Is it too frail and broken to cope with modern-day demands?
There’s plenty of bad news thrown up daily to back up that claim of terminal decline. This week’s bulletins: the post-Covid waiting list for non-urgent cases is now 2.6 million; deaths of mothers during and just after pregnancy reached their highest levels for 20 years; the junior doctors’ strike “has led to unprecedented disruption for patients and their families”. Junior doctors in Wales have just started a three-day strike.
It’s hard, I know, but do not surrender to pessimism. These problems are not inevitable nor immutable. Unlike most patients who reach the point of no return, the NHS can be returned to robust health. But revival would be unpropitious for right-wingers who have been drawing its blood since 2010 and persuading the population that no amount of money can save the decrepit “old model”.
We, the majority,........
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