Maggie Fricker, NHS radiographer
Private diagnostic services are booming. Companies were paid £216 million last year for reporting X-rays, CT scans and other diagnostic imaging. This is twice what they creamed off the NHS in 2019. And the Department of Health and Social Care thinks this is a good use of NHS resources!
But the reality is another example of the short-termism of this Labour government. Most patients will need some form of imaging when they come into hospital, whether it’s to diagnose cancer or a broken leg. But in the annual report from the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), the specialist doctors in this field, there are 30% fewer radiologists in the NHS than we need. Similar shortages of trained nurses and other health professionals exist across the NHS.
According to the president of the RCR, “The current sticking plaster approach to managing excess demand in Radiology is unsustainable and certainly isn’t working for patients, who face agonising waits for answers about their health”.
More cuts on the way
This government wants to cut staffing to 2019 levels despite the massive increase in our workload. This failure to plan and fund NHS services effectively opens the door to the outsourcing of many of our essential services to the leeches in the private sector. This leaves us dangerously short of staff as the result of the crippling funding cuts being imposed by health secretary Wes Streeting.
Labour’s privatisation agenda will lead to a fragmented service where training, innovation and health breakthroughs are only valued if they bring in large enough profits for big business.
More than ever, we need a fully funded NHS, with bursaries for students in training that cover the cost of living, safe staffing levels for patients and staff, and all privatised services taken back in-house without compensation. We should kick out the undemocratic business-like management we have now and replace it with workers and communities democratically running our NHS. This would mean services would be provided that reflect all our needs, not shrinking budgets imposed by the profit system of big business.
