Review by Mark Langabeer (Hastings and Rye Labour member)
ITV’s Tonight programme, on January 12, gave a glimpse of the crises in the Health Service. ‘When Can I See My GP?’ was produced and narrated by Amir Khan, a GP that appeared regularly on TV during the pandemic. There are health professionals who believe that possibly 500 patients die each week due to a lack of patient care.
Khan interviewed GP Marilyn Graham, who has worked as a GP for over 35 years. She described this winter as the worst ever. She believed that the whole system was in crisis. Like elsewhere, the pressure on GPs is enormous. A survey stated that 42% of them plan to leave the profession in the next five years. Another GP emigrated to Australia because the work-life balance was far better than the UK. According to Tonight, 40% of GPs have suffered mental health problems in recent years.
The programme reports that there has been an 18% increase in the number of appointments since 2019. Khan interviewed Wes Streeting, Labour’s spokesperson for health, who stated there are 5,000 fewer GPs than ten years ago and more than 2 million who have waited more than one month for an appointment.
Poorer health outcomes
Barclay, the Health Minister declined to appear on the programme. However, his department stated that they had recruited 2,300 new doctors. They plan to increase the number to 6,000 by March 1924. The problem with the figures produced by the department, though, is that it includes trainees as well as fully qualified GPs. According to the chair of the Royal College of GPs, it takes ten years before a practitioner becomes fully qualified. The problems in primary care are not going away anytime soon. Lengthy delays in face-to-face appointments will continue and poorer health outcomes will be the consequence.
Khan’s own surgery is in one the poorest areas of the UK and many of his patients suffer health problems because of deprivation. He states that there were 14 million appointments missed last year, which cost £421 million. The Tories are fond of using this as a cause of the problems in primary care. Sunak even proposed charging patients a tenner for missing an appointment. There are many valid reasons for missed appointments. My wife was recently carted off in an ambulance at a similar time to a GP appointment. Is that not a valid reason for missing an appointment?
Real causes of the crisis
Although the programme gave a good account of the problems facing primary care, it didn’t address the real causes of the current crises. Labour was spending nearly 6% of GDP on healthcare. This has fallen to under one and a half percent under the Tories. It’s Tory austerity that has caused this crisis in the NHS.
The Tories claimed that Labour had ‘overspent’ and public debt needed to be reduced. The Covid pandemic has resulted in national debt rising to higher levels than the banking crisis in 2008. New austerity measures are planned after the next general election in 1924.
Labour must oppose further cuts in our public services. It will have to challenge the power of the so-called markets, the banks and the big corporations that control the purse strings. Starmer and his followers will have to choose – either take control of the markets or do the dirty work for the Tories and their wealthy mates.
The programme is available on catch-up here.
