… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Category: NHS

  • Morning Star: Building unity against the Westminster consensus on the NHS

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    NHS sign

    JUNIOR doctors walking out for a fifth time this weekend are blamed by Tory ministers for the NHS’s record-breaking waiting lists.

    Their pay restoration demands are billed as greedy, though the case they make is straightforward, as the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee co-chair Dr Robert Laurenson points out: “Over the last 15 years, the government has cut our pay by 31.7 per cent so we’re looking to restore that pay back to what it was like in 2008.”

    Rishi Sunak declines even to discuss this — maintaining that the current offer is “fair and final,” on the grounds it has been recommended by an “independent” (by which he means government-appointed) pay review body.

    …

    Labour backs the Tory policy for reducing waiting lists, which is to increase NHS use of private-sector providers.

    This cannot possibly work, since the private sector is parasitical on the NHS and poaches NHS staff. Commissioning more private-sector work actively worsens the NHS staffing crisis.

    Our demand ultimately needs to be for more resources for the NHS. It needs more staff, it needs to pay them more and it needs to treat them better.

    The Westminster consensus against raising spending needs to be challenged. It’s therefore disappointing that Scottish Labour simply carped at the Scottish National Party after research it commissioned exposed the huge funding gap between the NHS and European healthcare systems — with Germany and Norway spending a full third more per head on healthcare than we do.

    …

  • Sunak failing to keep five key promises he made when appointed Prime Minister

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    UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Grant Shapps.
    Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Grant Shapps. Credit: Simon Dawson / 10 Downing Street, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/sunak-failing-to-keep-five-key-promises-he-made-when-appointed-prime-minister

    RISHI SUNAK’S five key promises, made shortly after becoming Prime Minister in January, have turned into five failures according to figures showing ministers’ lack of progress since then.

    …

    Taking his pledges in turn, inflation remains the highest in the G7 –with RPI still at an eye-watering 10.7 per cent in June.

    NHS waiting lists in England this week hit a new record high of 7.6 million.

    And Britain’s debt pile was bigger than its economic output in June – the first time this has happened in more than 60 years.

    Today’s 0.2 per cent growth in Q2 GDP was hailed as an unexpected win for Britain’s spluttering economy, which the Bank of England says will remain sluggish for years to come.

    And dangerous refugee crossings not only set a new record for the month of June, but fresh arrivals on Thursday saw the total number of people risking their lives to cross the English Channel on small boats reach 100,000 for the first time since 2018.

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/sunak-failing-to-keep-five-key-promises-he-made-when-appointed-prime-minister

  • NHS faces ‘worst crisis in its history’, experts warn on service’s 75th anniversary

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    https://leftfootforward.org/2023/07/nhs-faces-worst-crisis-in-its-history-experts-warn-on-services-75th-anniversary/

    Image reads Accident & Emergency, A & E

    As the NHS turns 75 today, three major health and care research institutes have warned that the future of the service is at risk, amid political short termism and a lack of investment and reform.

    The stark warning was made in a letter sent to Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and Ed Davey by the Health Foundation, Nuffield Trust and The King’s Fund. It stated: “75 years after its creation, the National Health Service is in critical condition. Pressures on services are extreme and public satisfaction is at its lowest since it first began to be tracked 40 years ago. Despite this, public support for the NHS as an institution is rock solid.”

    It called on party leaders to develop a long-term plan to address the current underlying causes of the crisis in the NHS.

    NHS sign

    The think tank chief executives write: “As leaders of three leading independent health and care research institutes, we urge you to make the next election a decisive break point by ending years of short-termism in NHS policy-making. Recovering NHS services and reducing waiting times for treatment should be a key priority for any government. However, our work shows that promising unachievable, unrealistically fast improvements without a long-term plan to address the underlying causes of the current crisis is a strategy doomed to failure. The path back to a stronger health service is through long-term policies that support innovation, boost productivity and provide the resources, capacity and technology it needs over multiple years.”

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    https://leftfootforward.org/2023/07/nhs-faces-worst-crisis-in-its-history-experts-warn-on-services-75th-anniversary/

  • Morning Star: Our NHS at 75: we have still faith, now we need to fight

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    People on Warren Street in London, ahead of a Support the Strikes march in solidarity with nurse 11 March 2023
    People on Warren Street in London, ahead of a Support the Strikes march in solidarity with nurse 11 March 2023

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/our-nhs-at-75-we-have-still-faith-now-we-need-to-fight

    Image reads Accident & Emergency, A & E

    …

    Today the NHS is in a deep crisis. Its millions-long waiting list condemns patients to seriously delayed treatments, often painfully, sometimes dangerously. Its hospitals are so overloaded ambulances line up outside, waiting hours to discharge patients.

    Those who can afford it are going private: the number paying for private hospital treatment has risen by nearly a third since 2019.

    This raises demand for trained medical workers in the private sector, with reports earlier this year that doctors were being offered £5,000 to recruit NHS colleagues to undertake private work, accelerating a vicious cycle in resource competition when the NHS already carries over 100,000 vacancies.

    The logic is towards a two-tier healthcare system in which those who can pay get faster treatment while the “universal” health service is reduced through under-resourcing to basic cover for the poor.

    Preventing this means challenging the two main drivers of NHS decline: underinvestment and privatisation.

    …

    NHS sign

    Since Tony Blair first introduced private provision within the NHS, the service itself has become a lucrative source of private profit. Extortionate PFI contracts, state collusion with big pharma over drug prices and reliance on private providers all waste NHS money.

    The last risks turning our health service into a commissioner rather than a provider of services, a brand name that masks a for-profit health system.

    That betrayal of Bevan’s vision is the current prospectus from both Tories and Labour. Saving the NHS means building a mass campaign for real solutions to its twin crises: a serious increase in investment, and an end to all private-sector involvement.

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/our-nhs-at-75-we-have-still-faith-now-we-need-to-fight

  • Doctors’ confidence in Tories reaches new low

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/doctors-confidence-in-tories-reaches-new-low

    BMA survey reveals breakdown of trust as junior doctors brace for biggest walkout in NHS history

    People take part in a rally in Trafalgar Square in London, in support of striking NHS junior doctors, as the British Medical Association holds a 96-hour walkout in a dispute over pay. Picture date: Tuesday April 11, 2023.
    People take part in a rally in Trafalgar Square in London, in support of striking NHS junior doctors, as the British Medical Association holds a 96-hour walkout in a dispute over pay. Picture date: Tuesday April 11, 2023.

    THE loss of trust between doctors and Tory ministers is the “worst it has been for at least three decades,” the British Medical Association (BMA) has warned.

    In a damning intervention ahead of the 75th birthday of the NHS on Wednesday, the union’s council chairman Dr Phil Banfield stressed that he has never known such a breakdown of trust in his 30 years as a medic.

    It is an “absolute travesty” that doctors feel they have no other choice but to strike following more than a decade of plummeting take-home pay, he added.

    The warning came as junior doctors prepare to stage the biggest walkout in the history of the health service between July 13 and 18.

    …

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/doctors-confidence-in-tories-reaches-new-low