Kelly O’Gara, Bournemouth Socialist Party
Our NHS is being failed. One in eight of us is currently on a waiting list, amounting to 6.84 million people. It’s a hefty rise from the pre-pandemic figure of 4.2 million.
At the peak of the Covid pandemic, 30% of patients waited longer than four hours to be seen in A&E and over 430,000 were on a waiting list for over a year. There has been a massive 25-fold increase in the number of those awaiting diagnostic tests for over 13 weeks. And during March 2022, one in ten people waited at least two-and-a-quarter hours for an ambulance.
This list of issues arising in our NHS is by no means exhaustive. The pandemic placed a huge strain on NHS services and staff. And shirking responsibility for years of cuts and privatisation, politicians are happy to blame Covid-19 as the sole cause of the current catastrophe.
However, a report from Quality Watch has found that the current issues are the consequence of a failing NHS meeting head on with a pandemic: “While the waiting list is now growing at a significantly faster rate than pre-pandemic, Covid-19 has only accelerated a long-term trajectory of declining NHS performance”.
4.4 million were on the treatment waiting list pre-pandemic, and had trends continued without a pandemic, lists would still have grown to 5.3 million. “This is reflective of a demand, staffing and resources mismatch that has been in play for a long time. Pre-existing backlogs for routine care, increasing waits in A&E departments, longer ambulance response times and waits for cancer treatment have only been accelerated throughout the pandemic”, according to a Nuffield Trust researcher.
The anxiety caused to those frantically seeking treatment has caused many to turn to private, ‘self-funded’ health care. Even during the cost-of-living crisis, demand for private health care is soaring. Self-pay admissions rose by 39% in two years from 2021. Desperate individuals are being forced to choose financial hardship in order to get treated.
As the newly appointed health secretary Thérèse Coffey takes office, Liz Truss has vaguely assured us that she will put the NHS on a “firm footing” with a forthcoming plan for the NHS to be unveiled soon. But both supported the cuts and privatisation of the last decade, and that is likely to be their chosen medicine again. Our NHS is at breaking point, as are the staff trying to keep the underfunded service afloat. Privatisation and cuts are sucking the NHS dry. We need all of the NHS back in public hands, and fully funded to ensure high-quality care, full staffing and decent pay for its workers.
