Between January and March this year, the NHS had to cancel 220 operations a day because it had run out of hospital beds.
A&E waiting times are at their worst level for nine years. A King’s Fund report says in the first three months of this year, 310,000 patients waited more than four hours in A&E — 39% more than in 2012.
A report by regulator Monitor showed evidence of deteriorating standards for cancer care, infection control and non-emergency operations.
The government response to the A&E crisis has been to blame New Labour’s “disastrous legacy”. Jeremy Hunt claims — against all the evidence — that the problems we see now are the result of a change in the GP contract in 2004 when GPs were given the choice of losing £6,000 from their salaries in exchange for their out-of-hours responsibilities. 90% of GPs took this deal and set up co-ops that provided the out-of-hours clinics on a private basis. A lot of them did very well out of the deal.
But even NHS Confederation boss Mike Farrar admitted that A&E waiting times have decreased since 2004 and only increased under Tory rule. GP consultations are up by one third since the 1990s. And on top of this the government are putting GPs in charge of the entire NHS budget. The Department of Health has identified that the main problem is that £20 billion cuts since 2010 has resulted in ward closures, bed shortages and staff shortages. Attempts to privatise the NHS have led to increased fragmentation and a untrained staff making inappropriate referrals (e.g. NHS 111). Sir Richard Thompson from the Royal College of Physicians says “This is no surprise — patients are presenting at emergency departments in increasing numbers because there is nowhere else they can go.”
The Nicholson challenge — a plan to flatline NHS spending until 2015 — was intended to focus NHS bosses’ minds on redesigning services. Nicholson saw that the health needs of the British population were soon going to change radically. More and more people are presenting with complex long-term conditions. These people are best treated in the community and kept away from costly hospital treatment.
Unfortunately, slashing the NHS budget is not the way to focus the minds of the NHS bosses on the necessary redesigning of services. Such a task cannot be undertaken when services are being cut to the bone.
Socialists need to arm the labour movement with the arguments so it can better fight these cuts and “reforms”.
Our strategy must be to build a mass campaign, building on local hospital campaigns and fighting in the Labour Party to enforce the decisions to fight cuts and PFI taken at the 2012 conference.
