The NHS’s 75th anniversary is 5 July – and, while it’s an important moment to celebrate, we must use this opportunity to hold politicians to account.
Over the past four decades, politicians have made policy changes to the health service in England that have allowed increasing privatisation, the introduction of an internal marketplace, and the loading of enormous private finance initiative debt upon many NHS trusts. We are now in a situation where thousands of NHS services are outsourced to non-NHS providers. This has atomised the service, damaging the architecture of the system as a whole, disrupting important relationships between people and teams, and creating chaos and bureaucracy, which always accompanies the churn of short-term contracts. A system that was once whole is thousands of tiny fragments now, some publicly-owned, some run by non-profits and others by profit-making companies.
Our public healthcare system is fast collapsing and a two-tier healthcare system is being built in its place, excluding more and more people from the care they need. In England alone, more than 7.3 million people are now awaiting treatment, the longest waiting list in history. The number of missing staff members was 124,000 at the last count. This past winter the situation was so stark some patients received life-saving treatment on the floor of A&E waiting rooms, behind sheets held up by staff members in a desperate attempt to offer them dignity and privacy. The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said up to 500 people may have died every single week late last year because they could not access the urgent care they needed from the NHS.
