When did syringing of ear wax become unavailable on the NHS? It used to involve a quick appointment at the GP and the job was done. Now you have to pay £60 or more to get it done privately!
NHS dentists – if you can find one – no longer do regular descaling, cleaning and polishing. So, if you can afford to, you have to pay a private hygienist £80 or more every six months, or risk being kicked out for not looking after your teeth properly.
Basic, minor surgical procedures, like the removal of benign skin lesions, are no longer available at the GP either. They are regarded as ‘cosmetic’, which means that many people have to just put up with them or fork out hundreds of pounds privately; again, only if they can afford to.
Even some clearly beneficial dental procedures – like complicated root fillings – require discretionary referral from a dentist. This is often not forthcoming because demand is too high for the available resources, cut to the bone after decades of austerity.
Minor ailments have effectively been outsourced to private pharmacists, who are now so overwhelmed by the additional workload that it can prove impossible to get a timely appointment. It seems like there was little or no forward planning to ensure that sufficient capacity existed within pharmacies to cope with this.
I’m pretty sure that this was not the vision of the NHS that Aneurin Bevan had in 1948. All of these procedures should be brought back fully within the NHS, free at the point of use as Bevan envisaged.
Jonathan Golding, Cardiff East Socialist Party
