Today – 5th July – is the NHS’s 71st birthday. The NHS is, of course, an institution that is dear to the hearts of the British public, and, ostensibly at least, to the hearts of our political leaders. So it was unsurprising that last year’s 70th birthday provided an occasion for a good deal of celebration, including much self-congratulation about the UK’s global leadership in providing its citizens with a universal, publicly-funded health system that is the envy of the rest of the world.
One year on, it’s a good time to reflect on how all this back-slapping measures up to the reality. And when we do, we see a rather less uplifting picture. Years of chronic underfunding have resulted in massive staff shortages (and low staff morale), increases in already-alarming waiting times, patients being treated in corridors due to lack of beds, etc. In the past few days, the Chief Inspector of Hospitals asserted that ‘the mounting pressure on the system is having a direct impact on how people are experiencing inpatient care’, the Health Foundation think tank argued that an additional £8 billion funding is needed or else the Government’s long-term plan for the NHS will fail, the Chief Executive of NHS England has decried that the hospital bed cutbacks have gone too far, and the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation acknowledged that “Hospital bosses face crippling staff vacancies, rising demand for care, lack of investment in buildings and equipment, and the drastic cuts to social care and public health that are fuelling extra demand on A&E and other frontline services.”
All of which confirms what patients of the NHS have known for years: the values of universal, free access to quality services that underpinned the creation and early history of the NHS are no more than an increasingly distant memory. The neoliberal drift can be seen more and more even in our framing of patients as ‘consumers’ of healthcare rather than patients, health becomes our own personal responsibility rather than a collective one in the public good.
