The 1997 Blair government inherited a National Health
Service that was on its knees – with patients waiting literally years for
operations in crumbling hospitals which had been built before the NHS was
founded in 1948. Over the following decade, that government rebuilt and
reformed the NHS, with more nurses, more doctors, more operations, shorter
waiting times and over 100 new hospitals. I didn’t agree with every reform, but
it was no wonder that public satisfaction with the NHS was at a record high by
2010.
Unfortunately, this government’s record on the NHS is
shameful. David Cameron promised “I'll
cut the deficit, not the NHS”. He assured nurses there would be no top-down
reorganisations. He went round hospitals promising patients he would save Accident
and Emergency Departments from closure. And what has happened? The deficit went
up last year while over 4,000 nurses were cut. £3 billion was wasted on a
top-down reorganisation. And the very A&E units David Cameron promised to
save are closing down.
The recent Keogh review contained challenging but accurate
picture of care standards and failings at 14 NHS trusts. We must, however,
remember that the problems identified in these hospitals are not typical of the
NHS or of the care given by NHS staff. We should seek to learn from this report
and not use it to tarnish the many doctors, nurses and NHS staff who look after
us in our NHS. The vast majority of doctors and nurses working in the NHS
perform to a very high standard day in, day out, but everyone in the country
will be worried that some hospitals are letting people down. Sir Bruce Keogh’s
excellent and important report found that the most serious problems arose where
there were “inadequate numbers of nursing staff”.
We should all be horrified by the massive exercise of
vandalism that has destroyed NHS Direct. This is a mess entirely of the
government’s own making. We had a single, trusted national service and they
decided to break it up into 46 cut-price contracts, where essentially computers
have replaced nurses. And the contractors have now decided that they can’t even
provide a reduced service for the price they promised.
So what have we now got? “The computer says ‘No’. Go to A&E.” Is it any surprise that
we’ve ended up with record numbers going to A&E and the return of patients
spending hours on trolleys in corridors?
