By Steve McKenzie, UNITE Community member
A recent RCN report identified that patients are dying unnecessarily as a result of corridor care that is being forced on hospitals through a lack of resources. As the report explains, non-ward care is a result of chronically overstretched and overcrowded accident and emergency departments and the lack of available ward beds and staff.
Treatment cubicles are full and overflowing, so patients are forced to wait to be seen for hours, and on some occasions days in corridors on trolleys. Sometimes there are not even enough trolleys and the best that can be provided is a mattress.
On top of this, because of the lack of hospital beds on the wards and not enough staff, ambulances are having to queue up outside with patients on board. These are ambulances that are then unavailable for emergencies elsewhere. On 8 January there were reports that in the West Midlands there were 130 out of 400 ambulances parked outside hospitals waiting to pass over patients.
There are over seven and a half million on waiting lists for surgery. It is sometimes impossible to get a GP appointment. The crisis in the health service has never been this bad.
While all of this is going on, the Labour government tinkers around the edges making limited increased investment. Starmer and Streeting seem more interested in limiting expenditure while handing over huge chunks of the NHS to the private sector. They prattle on about Artificial Intelligence and improving apps, as if that means anything to the poor people languishing in pain on a trolley or on a mattress in a hospital corridor.
To avoid confronting acute problems that need immediate attention, they are setting up endless consultations and enquiries, to give the appearance of doing something, rather than just getting on with actually doing what needs to be done.
Getting to grips with and taking meaningful action to solve the problems in the NHS will involve major investment and kicking the profit motive and private contractors out of the health service. It is clear that the political will to do this is not there with this Labour leadership; it is something they are not even prepared to contemplate.
Existing facilities need to be upgraded and expanded
The solution to the problems in the NHS are blatantly obvious: more doctors, nurses and healthcare workers are desperately needed, and that’s just to fill the vacancies that currently stand at over 135,000. Existing facilities need to be upgraded and expanded, creating more capacity to deal with demand.
These initial steps would involve major investment and a massive recruitment drive, something which the government is simply not prepared to commit to. They constantly tell us that the money isn’t there, but that simply is not true. What’s missing is the political will to keep the NHS a truly public service.
The money is there; the trouble is that huge amounts are being siphoned off by building conglomerates and financial institutions in interest payments on PFI loans (from the disastrous New Labour policy of the Private Finance Initiative), and in profiteering by the private sector. There were £13bn worth of PFI projects in the NHS, yet in total, £80bn will be paid back in interest charges. That meant £67bn going into the pockets of building and financial institutions that should have been spent on front line services.
On top of this, according to We Own It, £10mn a week is going in profits to private healthcare providers. That is money that should be spent on more doctors and nurses and healthcare facilities. Any doctor carrying out a procedure or operation in a private facility is a doctor who ought to be working in the NHS and was probably (unless trained abroad) trained by the NHS, which doesn’t get a penny back for it.
The government can increase spending on defence, apparently, and commit billions to the Ukrainian war effort but it cannot rebuild the NHS.
Enough is enough, it is way past time that the NHS campaign groups and the NHS unions started a national campaign to save and rebuild the NHS. The TUC organised a national demonstration against Tory NHS cuts in 2017, and that brought over 200,000 out onto the streets of London.
The NHS unions must press the TUC to do the same again, and organise a national march and rally. It would attract thousands once again and if it was organised properly, probably hundreds of thousands.
