The Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow was the first last Thursday to announce that it had no critical care capacity left. The hospital, run by London North West University Healthcare Trust, had already by then seen six deaths from coronavirus. But Northwick Park will not be the last: it is merely ahead of a gruesome curve.
Chief executive of NHS England, said a week ago that the health service could call on no more than 3,700 adult critical care beds and only about 8,000 ventilators, even by the meagre standards of this government, tens of thousands short of what will be needed. The cancellation of all non-urgent surgery will help free up beds, but does not go near to addressing the surge of seriously-ill patients expected in the next few weeks.
The UK government is in ‘talks’
While other governments in Europe have already built or are building emergency centres, the UK government, as usual, is in ‘talks’. A patient seriously ill with respiratory problems has a far better chance of survival with a bed, nursing care and access to oxygen. For that reason, the Spanish government, for example, is creating make-shift hospitals in large spaces like sports halls and exhibition centres. The UK government is talks.
It has taken the government two weeks to get the private hospital sector to come to an agreement with the NHS. In fact, the private hospital sector should have been requisitioned three weeks ago, to bring its 8,000 beds, 1200 ventilators and 10,000 nurses into play. In London alone, more than 2,000 beds will be made available. The deal between the private sector and the NHS, it has been announced, will not ‘profit’ the private sector – it will be work done “at cost.” The labour movement will be vigilant to make sure there is indeed no profiteering on the back of this crisis. After the epidemic is beaten, we must ensure that the private sector is permanently integrated into the NHS.
Relentless cutting of the NHS
There will have to be a reckoning when this is all over. The Tories will have to answer for their relentless cutting of the NHS and Johnson personally will have to answer for this slowness to respond to a major health crisis. For decades NHS beds have been cut remorselessly. What used to be a national ‘service’ has been ‘marketised’ and privatised.
The most damaging years have undoubtedly been the last ten years under the Tories but we must not forget the New Labour years, when the ‘internal market’ was introduced into the NHS and PFI took on monstrous proportions. Every new PFI hospital had few beds than the one it replaced. In 1987-88 the NHS had 300,000 hospital beds, but the figure has fallen by 44 per cent to just over 150,000, in twenty years. The result is that the NHS has 2.1 acute beds per 1,000 people today, far fewer than most comparable economies.
Johnson “may be broken by recriminations”
Robert Shrimsley, writing in the Financial Times today (March 23(, points at the seriousness of the political fall-out that will follow this pandemic. “If Johnson gets through this crisis, he writes, “he may be broken by the recriminations which follow. There is no avoiding the grisly global scorecard against which he will be judged. But even if he endures, the landscape will be changed entirely….”
Like many commentators, Shrimsley draws a comparison to wartime, but adds that “wartime mobilisation and central planning smoothed the path to nationalisation and the welfare state, a fact not lost on some of today’s left who see the scope to recharge some of their policy positions…there will be an absolute demand to fund spare capacity in the NHS. The Tories already face a reckoning on underfunding. Voters will not tolerate another NHS winter fuel crisis, with too few medical staff and too little equipment.”
There will indeed be a reckoning and it is incumbent on socialists to discuss the implications now, not later, the better to prepare the Labour Party and trades unions for what must follow.
March 23, 2020
