NHS in crisis: how can we fix the health service?

A range of senior health professionals called publicly this week for urgent action to address a growing crisis in the NHS. The British Medical Association described the pressure on the service as “intolerable and unsustainable”, and warned that patients were “dying unnecessarily” as a result of government inaction.

The Liberal Democrats called for the early recall of Parliament to discuss the “life-or-death situation for huge numbers of patients” posed by the NHS “collapsing in front of our eyes”. Downing Street acknowledged that the NHS is facing an “unprecedented challenge” this winter, but PM Rishi Sunak said that he was “confident” that it had the funding it needs to cope.

Ministers must act to alleviate the immediate crisis, said the Daily Mail. Around 13,000 beds in England are filled by people who are well enough to leave hospital but can’t, owing to delays in social care provision. Sunak is rightly looking at new ways to free up those beds, and considering giving local pharmacists in England the power to prescribe some drugs (as is already the case in Scotland and Wales).

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In the meantime, said The Times, we can all do our bit to alleviate this crisis by heeding the advice of the UK Health Security Agency: “when feeling off-colour, either stay home or wear a mask in public”.

Can’t take assistance for granted

For the first time in my lifetime, Britons are living in fear of needing medical assistance, said Tom Peck in The Independent. Some families didn’t let their children go sledding last month out of concern that if they injured themselves, nobody would be available to treat them.

People have become aware that the prompt arrival of an ambulance can no longer be taken for granted; that they might be better off seeking medical help via “Dr Google”, or knowledgeable friends, than through the NHS. It represents “a dramatic shift in our way of life”.

The NHS “winter crisis” has become an annual fixture, said Matthew d’Ancona in the Evening Standard, but this year’s is of a different order. We’ve got ambulances queuing round the block outside hospitals, unable to discharge patients; such chaos in A&E departments that a patient in Swindon had to wait 99 hours for a bed; more than seven million people on treatment waiting lists in England.

“As an ecosystem, the NHS is simply no longer functioning.” And there’s no getting round the fact that fixing it is “going to require a huge and sustainable increase in funding”. We have a choice. We can accept that an effective, resilient health service requires more money. Or we can keep reading “increasingly dire headlines every winter”.

Throwing more money at NHS won’t help

We won’t solve this problem by throwing ever more money at the NHS, said James Le Fanu in The Daily Telegraph. Over the past three years, NHS spending has been hiked by 11% in real terms; the NHS has recruited 10% more consultants, 15% more junior doctors and 8% more nurses. Yet despite this it carried out fewer treatments in 2022 than in 2019.

The solution lies in reforming the NHS’s overcentralised structure, rather than simply increasing funding, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. The Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, reportedly admitted that he wouldn’t even “know what to do with more cash if he got it”.

It’s time to replace the defunct NHS model, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. Many European nations have health services based on personal and state insurance, which “offer better outcomes for everyone, including the poor”. Where is the politician brave enough to admit that our model is broken?