NHS A&E Crisis scandal

Coalition meddling in the NHS puts lives at risk.

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The Independent carries a shocking (though unsurprising) story on what lies behind the crisis in many of Britain’s Accident & Emergency wards today.

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Britain’s A&E crisis could have been averted two years ago if the Government had heeded warnings of a looming collapse in casualty ward staffing, the country’s top emergency doctor has said.

Dr Clifford Mann, President of the College of Emergency Medicine, said that ministers and health chiefs were “tied in knots” by the challenges of implementing the Coalition’s health reforms from 2011 onwards, leading to them ignoring the first warnings of an imminent crisis from the College that the NHS was failing to recruit enough new A&E doctors.

Although a new recruitment drive for A&E doctors is now under way, Dr Mann told The Independent that the Government’s reforms – which finally came into effect in April – had caused “decision-making paralysis” throughout the NHS for 18 months, leaving the College in a position akin to “John the Baptist crying in the wilderness”.

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Dr Mann could hardly be more damning in his criticism of coalition meddling in the NHS

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“The first warning signs were three years ago when we failed to recruit to 50 per cent of our posts – that was 2010,” Dr Mann said. “Those concerns were raised at the time.”

“We failed to recruit enough staff again the next year,” he continued. “The problem at that time was many people were still wrestling with moving the Health and Social Care Act through Parliament and working out how it was going to be implemented.

“It took a lot of time and resources from the medical royal colleges and other organisations wondering how they should approach such an enormous piece of legislation and potential change. It tied us all up in knots for quite a long time. There was a lot of decision-making paralysis and stasis in the system at that time.”

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A&E wards missed waiting times targets two weeks in a row before Christmas. Last years A&E performance was the worst in nine years.  

The Coalition has variously blamed Britain’s ageing population, changes to GP out-of-hours care, or more recently, denied that the crisis even exists.

Now we learn that it is the governments meddling in the NHS which has caused the problems.

Dr Mann said  a staffing crisis had left the country short of around 375 emergency doctors – which over the course of a year means “750,000 patients per year who aren’t going to be seen”.

Before recent concerns about A&E waiting times surfaced, the representatives from the College of Emergency Medicine had met with the Health Secretary only twice in four years but have now (since its become a scandal in the media – Haze)  held two meetings with the current Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in the past two months alone.

So the government’s disastrous Health and Social Care Act which is the enabling document to break up the NHS has had predictable consequences for critical care services in the NHS which now has a full blown recruitment crisis that puts intense strain on those staff who remain.

The other NHS news story that broke yesterday is about an open letter signed by the leaders of 10 NHS organisations, published in the Guardian, which calls for “a more measured view of how the NHS is performing” and blames ministers, NHS bosses and the media for creating an atmosphere in which demoralised and frustrated staff feel the service is facing constant attacks.

None of this is any surprise to The Haze.

Ministers rubbish the NHS as much as they can two reasons:

(a) To lay the ground with the public for the continued break up and privatisation of the service as a whole

(b) To keep people within the NHS off balance, nervous and defensive. This goes a long way to repressing any internal opposition to the on-going neoliberalisation of healthcare provision in the UK.

On the one hand the Coalition drip feeds the NHS disastrous neoliberal ‘reforms’ and then uses the resultant chaos to place an image in the public’s mind of a system in permanent crisis and disarray – the perfect excuse for more neoliberal meddling and privatising.  

The NHS is facing a deliberate and concerted attack from the very people who pledged solemnly that there would be “no top down re-organisations of the NHS” and who have instead arrogantly foisted changes on the NHS in spite of unified opposition and warnings from every major body in the service – warnings that they continue to ignore and which put the lives of patients at risk.

It may take a decade or more to undo the damage this coalition has inflicted on the NHS in a few short years.

It is always going to be easier for a cynical dishonest group like the Tories to work on destroying the NHS than it was for the socialist movement that worked so hard to create it.

British people should not be seduced by any more coalition lies about the NHS – the truth is being laid bare on a day by day basis.

The NHS is a practical example of social co-operation in action and an  ideological contradiction to everything that the neoliberal crowd insists we have no alternative to.

Defend your NHS or lose it – its that simple.

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