HEALTH SECRETARY SORRY FOR WINTER NHS CRISIS
HEALTH Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday apologised to patients whose operations will be cancelled amid the winter crisis engulfing the NHS.
Hospitals in England have been ordered to delay pre-planned surgery and routine outpatient appointments until February over severe pressure.
In a sign of the immense strain on services NHS England said nonurgent elective surgery like hip replacements should be postponed until the end of the month to free up staff and beds.
Up to 55,000 will be scrapped, along with thousands of outpatient appointments and scans. Casualty units are under “extreme and sustained pressure”, with cases of flu rocketing.
Mr Hunt said: “It is absolutely not what I want. This is the busiest week of the year for the NHS. What is different this year compared to last year is that last year we had a lot of operations cancelled at the last minute, a lot of people were called up the day before their operation and told, ‘I’m sorry, it can’t go ahead’.
Belittle
“And we recognise that it is better, if you are unfortunately going to have to cancel or postpone some operations, to do it in a planned way, and that’s why this year this independent panel has decided to take this decision and that, I think, in the end, is better for people.
“Although if you are someone whose operation has been delayed I don’t belittle that for one moment and indeed I apologise to everyone who that has happened to.”
The unprecedented action, as the NHS approaches its 70th anniversary, is the first time hospitals have been ordered to take such drastic measures during winter.
One doctor apologised for “Third World” conditions with increasing numbers of patients treated in corridors and 10-hour waits in A&E.
John Kell of the Patients Association said ministers “directly accountable to Parliament” should shoulder the blame for the patients’ plight. The crisis comes as Britain’s bloated foreign aid commitments now total £13.4billion a year. But if less than a tenth was diverted to the NHS £1.24billion could fund three million stays in a hospital bed, which cost £400 a night, or almost 11 million A&E visits, which average £114 each.
Tory Dr Sarah Wollaston, chairwoman of the Commons Health Select Committee, called for more money to ease a system “running at absolutely full stretch”.
Yesterday Prime Minister Theresa May said: “The NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before, we have put extra funding in.
“There are more beds available across the system, we’ve reduced the number of delayed discharges of elderly people who would otherwise have been in NHS beds rather than in social care. But I recognise for those people that have had their operations postponed this is disappointing, it’s frustrating.
“We will ensure those operations are put back as soon as possible and once again, I say that NHS staff are doing a fantastic job.”
THE NHS winter crisis has become a fixed ritual in the calendar. This January is no different. In melodramatic terms we are told once again that the health service is facing catastrophic meltdown. Thousands of routine operations have been postponed. Waiting times at casualty units are reportedly stretching to 10 hours. Yesterday a senior doctor in Stoke even went so far as to issue a personal apology for the “third world conditions” that his patients encounter.
This annual bout of hysteria exposes a profoundly schizophrenic attitude towards the NHS. On the one hand, the service is lauded as one of Britain’s greatest post-war achievements. It is supposedly the “envy of the world”, a shining symbol of compassion and equality. On the other hand, it is gripped by a climate of permanent despair, always struggling to meet the needs of patients because of its chronic inadequacies.
Defenders of the NHS like to claim the current problems are down to “underfunding” by the Conservative Government. This is continually peddled by professional medical bodies, trade unions and their allies.
Indeed there must be a suspicion that this new winter crisis has been deliberately hyped by NHS lobbyists as a cynical propaganda exercise to exert pressure on Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. The relentless narrative of woe serves as a form of blackmail against the Tories by reinforcing their image as cruel reactionaries with a secret agenda to destroy the NHS.
SUCH a charge is nonsense. Since the NHS was created in 1948 every Conservative government, even Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s, has massively expanded its funding and activities. The present Tory administration has followed the same approach, guided by Hunt who has proved a highly competent, self-assured, progressive Health Secretary.
Far from presiding over “cuts” the Conservatives increased total health spending in England to £124billion in 2016/17, up from £78.8billion a decade earlier when Tony Blair was in charge. Expenditure is due to rise further in real terms to more than £127billion by the end of the decade.
The number of hospital doctors has actually increased by 11,000 since 2010 while there are also 4,000 more nurses and 2,000 more ambulance staff. The same pattern can be seen in the number of operations, which rose by 40 per cent in the decade since 2006.
More staff, more operations, more funds – if the Tories really want to wreck the NHS they are going a funny way about it. But simply showering even greater sums of taxpayers’ money is no answer to the endless cycle of crises in the service. That is because the current, quasi-socialistic model of healthcare in Britain is deeply flawed, anachronistic and inflexible.
For a start the idea of a free service to all users, regardless of their contribution or ties to our society, is hopelessly selfdestructive in the age of mass immigration when, according to official figures, about 600,000 new arrivals are annually settling here. The real scale of the influx could be far higher since 741,000 national insurance numbers were dished out to foreigners last year, entitling all of them to NHS treatment.
The system cannot cope with this soaring demand, particularly because only 43 per cent of migrants come here to work. The health alarmists bang on about obesity, the ageing population and advances in medical technology as the causes of the crises but they refuse to address the reality that mass immigration is imposing the intolerable strain on the NHS.
There are a host of other difficulties. The service is far too bureaucratic, oozing a culture of tick-boxes and targets. One doctor recently estimated that there are eight managers and support staff for every 10 nurses, a figure that falls to 1.8 in private hospitals.
The system is also too driven by vested professional interests, a flaw that led to the farce of the 2004 GPs’ contract which increased pay and destroyed the out-of-hours service. Only last month it was revealed that Britain’s best-paid family doctor received more than £700,000 last year, as one of 200 GPs earning above £200,000 annually. Furthermore the NHS fails to concentrate on its core services, wasting far too much of its resources on initiatives such as useless, finger-wagging health prevention campaigns or the fashionable mania for gender reassignment.
BUT by far the greatest failing is the structure of the NHS itself. It was built for an entirely different era when life expectancy was lower, the population smaller, medicine simpler and society less affluent, though even in 1948 the mix of high demand and statist mismanagement meant that it was soon in trouble. Within just 18 months it had to be given an emergency cash injection of £100million, the equivalent of almost a quarter of its annual budget.
The NHS has been in crisis ever since. Tellingly no other developed country has ever copied this monopolistic monolith, for the simple reason that it does not work. Most European nations rely on a mix of charging, social insurance and private enterprise in addition to state support. The result is the avoidance of these perpetual winter nightmares.
The sentimentality and ideology over the outdated NHS is undermining healthcare. What we need is more pragmatism and less dogma.
‘Showering taxpayers’ money is no answer’