Siobhan Friel, Birmingham Central Socialist Party
The NHS is in crisis. Everybody in Britain knows it. When even leaders of Tory councils are saying it, we can assume the situation has reached breaking point. Front and centre in the crisis is the massive funding and staffing gap in social care, which leaves medically fit patients unable to be discharged, as their care needs cannot be met at home. Waiting times for GPs, hospital beds and ambulances are getting longer.
The Tories have been driving it to this point for decades, and they were helped on the way by Tony Blair’s New Labour government, which first introduced Private Finance Initiatives.
The new health and social care secretary Thérèse Coffey has launched “Our plan for patients”, her ‘solution’ to the growing crisis. It is supposed to address inadequate social care, which leads to fewer hospital beds, longer waiting times for treatment and emergency care. This would be welcome, except the promised £500 million investment is going to do very little to close the £3.7 billion funding deficit being claimed by Tory councils.
Further measures have been announced promising to reduce GP waiting times to a maximum of two weeks, and to leave in place the cap which requires hospitals to treat patients admitted from A&E within a four-hour window.
What has not been explained, is how any of these measures are going to be achieved! There is nothing to address the shortage of doctors and care staff; nothing to compel care providers to pay their staff an adequate wage to fill staffing gaps, nor to support providers in accessing the funds with which to do so.
How are GP appointments going to increase, and ambulance and hospital wait times decrease, without funding and staffing to make these goals possible, and without any accountability for meeting targets?
Coffey says she will be a “champion” of patients with “relentless focus”. But these are just words. In almost the same breath, tax cuts for the rich have been announced with pride, amid claims of improving services. Like the notion that ordinary people can pay skyrocketing bills without wage increases – the numbers do not add up!
The systematic dismantling of the NHS over years has left it unable to function, and this new plan from Liz Truss’ government is grossly inadequate to meet the task of reversing this damage. The NHS and social care must be brought back into public ownership in its entirety and properly funded by taking the vast wealth off the super-rich. Under the democratic control of doctors, nurses, carers, porters, cleaners and all other workers who keep it running – with input from patients and the wider community – investment could be planned to really improve services.
