Frances Warboys from the campaigning group Defend Enfield NHS (DENHS) says it's time to restore the National Health Service to its former level of efficiency and effectiveness.
"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"
Nye Bevan, 1948
We are those folk - come and join us!
At last we have an opportunity to put things right for our treasured NHS! On 4 July we can vote for a government with the political will to rescue our national health service, its patients and its staff.
But first, let’s think: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
How could an institution that only a few years ago was still the envy of the world suddenly be regarded as on its knees? In 2015, a renowned US think tank, the Commonwealth Fund, ranked the NHS as number one in a comparison of safety, affordability and efficiency in 11 countries including France, Germany, Australia and the USA. It noted that as a percentage of GDP spent on healthcare, the UK spent the least and the USA the most yet, despite that, the USA private healthcare system came bottom. So clearly that is not a system that any government in the UK should aspire to.
How is it that the NHS has suffered so badly since then? Sadly, the rot set in after the 2010 election, when the average annual funding increase was cut from around 4% to 1%. It is a tribute to its excellence that the service survived so well for the first few years.
Since then, the knock-on effect in recruitment and retention of staff, cuts in the number of beds, waiting lists of 7.5 million for appointments, queues of ambulances outside hospital A&E departments and, as a consequence, the inability of ambulance crews and paramedics to respond quickly enough to emergency call outs, has damaged its reputation and ability to care for the nation almost beyond repair. Today, the Royal College of Nursing has declared the treatment of patients in hospital corridors and store cupboards a national emergency.
The list goes on. The Covid pandemic and the lockdown imposed by government, when ministers and their advisers in Westminster enjoyed Partygate while hard-pressed doctors and nurses fought relentlessly to keep patients alive and loved ones were told to keep away during patients’ final hours. Medics and nurses were let down by unusable PPE but also by a government ill-prepared for a pandemic about which it had received fair warning. And yet, their reward was little more than clapping, with nurses having had the lowest pay rise of all public sector workers, and doctors now planning yet another strike in support of the hard-earned restoration of their salaries after 14 years of below-inflation pay increases.
The government’s obsession with privatisation of the health service is evidenced by contracts issued for the take-over of NHS hospitals, contracts which were then abandoned when insufficient profits were made. Staff trained by the NHS were poached; and patients had to be rescued by the NHS if an operation at a private hospital went wrong and, as in most cases, it had no emergency or intensive care provision.
And there’s more. The government’s undermining of NHS dentistry, with inadequate funding and lack of available appointments causing people to resort to pulling out their own teeth!
The decision to allow certain GP consultations to be transferred to a pharmacist, where appropriate, despite many community pharmacies having to close. The increased use of lower-qualified physician and nursing associates, who then must be supervised, reducing the time available for doctors to see other patients.
These are some of the more obvious ways in which our health service is now run. Far more insidious is the way in which our health data is being used. Patient confidentiality has always been paramount and medical records should not be shared without our consent. While sharing health data is important for research purposes, patients were able to opt out.
And yet the government has already allowed the private sector to exploit its failure to invest in digital technology, leaving the NHS dependent on Big Tech companies to manage what is the biggest health data set in the world. Despite our medical records being private and sensitive, a £480 million contract has already been awarded to Palantir, an American company operating in the fields of spying and battle technology. How is this appropriate, how can they be trusted with our information, and can we still opt out? Who knows?
This cannot go on! The time for change is now!
For more detail on the challenges facing the NHS, and the vision of national campaigning organisation Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) to restore it to its former glory, please go to: keepournhspublic.com/campaigns. Its five main principles are:
- A publicly provided NHS: with an end to private involvement
- An NHS funded to succeed: not under-funded to fail
- Respect, recognition, decent pay and conditions for all health workers
- Re-investment in public health and tackling health inequalities
- Rebuild, restore and expand OUR NHS.
The state of the NHS in June 2024
- Where parts of the NHS are contracted to the private sector, commercial confidentiality prevents public scrutiny and this has weakened the health service.
- The UK government currently spends 21% per head less on health than France, and 39% less than Germany. Funding must match the level of comparable economies.
- Funding is desperately needed to recruit and retain staff to fill the 121,000 vacancies, to restore safe staffing levels, and to prevent staff feeling under-paid, under-valued and demoralised. And to repair and rebuild neglected hospitals to provide safe working conditions.
- Health inequalities have caused increases in life expectancy to stagnate or become reversed since 2010 for the first time in 100 years.
Return the NHS to its founding principles and build an NHS for all of us, freed from the fear of waiting lists and health charges. A strong NHS means a healthy society and a healthy economy.
There is no better way to sum up the rationale for the existence of DENHS, Health Campaigns Together, Keep Our NHS Public, Doctors for the NHS, Junior Doctors Alliance, NHS Patient Voice, We Own It, and many others than in the words of Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS in July 1948:
“THE NHS WILL LAST AS LONG AS THERE ARE FOLK LEFT WITH THE FAITH TO FIGHT FOR IT”.
We are those folk - come and join us!
