Health leader reveals fears over NHS future
EXPERIENCED staff will leave the NHS sooner than they might have if the Government does not come up with a plan for the health service’s recovery from the pandemic and its future, a senior health leader has warned.
The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said she is “genuinely not confident” that the Government has a plan for the NHS, which is facing rising waiting lists and continued pressure from coronavirus cases.
Dr Katherine Henderson said there must be a plan in the short term to manage public expectations and give staff a vision on “somewhere that we’re going” and a longer-term outline of how to resource the health service to provide the care people expect.
If this does not happen soon, the most experienced people who are approaching retirement but are “holding a lot of stuff together” will “bail out”, she said.
She told the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus: “We can’t limp from investigation to investigation, to criticism, to yet another scandal where workforce comes down to being the primary problem.
“We don’t have enough people able to deliver the standard of care that we believe the NHS ought to be able to do, and so, unless that plan starts being articulated pretty quickly, people will start exiting stage left.”
She said while younger people will always come into the NHS, there will be employees with years of experience “who will leave sooner than they should”.
Dr Henderson, an emergency medicine consultant at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, said people are “significantly concerned about the moral injury” inflicted by the pandemic and the “complete lack of vision as to what is happening. How are we going to deal with the situation we’re in?”
During an online session yesterday, she told the parliamentary panel: “I think giving the NHS staff an idea of what the plan is, overall, would go some way to solidify people’s feeling that they could carry on coping.”
Asked if she thinks the Government has a plan, she said: “No, I’m really, genuinely not confident there is a plan.”
Emergency departments are already facing pressure in late summer, with almost three-quarters who responded to a recent RCEM survey saying they were unable to maintain social distancing every day, said Dr Henderson.
She said: “We’re in August. So what it’s going to be like when there’s more respiratory virus is really difficult, and that’s what I mean about having a plan.
“We just don’t really have a plan for that,” she added.
The Government has said a further 174 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of yesterday, bringing the UK total to 131,854.
That tally is the highest reported daily death toll since March 12, although the figures are likely to include a lag in reporting over the weekend.
As of 9am yesterday, there had been a further 30,838 laboratoryconfirmed Covid-19 cases in the UK, the Government added.