The NHS may not survive as we know it
This Facebook post by Robert Galloway is being widely shared, at his request, so I’m sharing it too.
Dear Journalists and Editors of the BBC, Sky, Times, The Sun, Telegraph etc.
As someone who cares deeply about the NHS, I am so depressed and disappointed at your level of coverage at what is happening to our NHS.
Today was a crucial news day for what is happening to the NHS and yet the silence from your outlets was deafening. It is falling apart and you are quite happy to either not mention it or repeat the lies and deceit coming from the government.
Where was the coverage of the release of data showing the worst ever NHS perfomance? Only 83% of A&E patients are getting seen and sorted within 4 hours. In January alone 50,000 people waited over 4 hours on a trolley for a ward bed after it was decide they needed admission by the inpatient team. This is a quadrupling from January 2011.
The scene in the image is taken from a hospital in the north of England and from an article in the Daily Mirror. But it could be taken from any A&E hospital in the country. The problems of the NHS are showing up in the corridors of A&E departments up and down the country and yet you are not reporting on it to the level it needs.
Meanwhile, waits for test are going up, targets for cancer treatments are being missed and ambulance response times are getting slower. Patients are suffering and care is deteriorating and yet you are just repeating government spin and mistruths.
And where was the coverage of the junior doctors strike? The government have ignored all expert advice, lied about junior doctors work commitment and ethics and ploughed ahead to forcibly impose a new contract which will drive thousands away from the NHS and so risk patient safety. And yet you say little, or attack the integrity of doctors who make a stand against what is happening.
Where is the critical analysis of Hunt and Cameron’s arrogance and belligerence in forcing an unnecessary industrial dispute for their own political ideology?
And most importantly where was the coverage today of the planned second reading of the NHS reinststment bill in the House of Commons? A bill which proposes to invest in the NHS and stop the privatisation and destruction of our NHS.
But the bill wasn’t even allowed to be debated in the House of Commons as Tory MPs deliberately over ran the previous debate to deny parliament the opportunity to discuss it. (I noticed they didn’t let the debate run onto a Saturday though). Yet few of you said anything.
Of course there are many examples of very good journalism on the NHS – both on a national and local level and on print, on line, TV and radio. But on the whole, many outlets place a lack of importance on this and there seems to be a general bias against NHS staff and the ethos of the NHS.
What is happening to our NHS is scandalous and yet many of you are being complicit in it. Why don’t you try and be more impartial for a change? For example how about having doctors and nurses debating against politicans on question time, instead of being the voice of the government? (if you are looking for someone to debate the politicians, I and 54,000 doctors would quite happily oblige)
The NHS was born in a time of great austerity and yet is being destroyed in the name of austerity. You as journalists, need to start listening to your viewers and readers and holding the government to account. Because if you don’t, they will carry on this ideological destruction, and the NHS may not survive as we know it. Our kids may never forgive us.
regards
Rob Galloway – @drrobgalloway
(A&E Consultant)
p.s. please feel free to share (ideally on public profile) incase it gets noticed by the odd journalist or editor and then they might have a rethink about their coverage.
Follow the money. In what way is austerity benefiting the media? What investments do they hold that may improve under greater privatization?
As someone with a 20 year background of working for the NHS I agree almost completely.
Ignore the four hour waiting thing – it’s a red herring, a target that was centrally imposed by a government wanting something tangible they could use to “measure” performance. It is not appropriate for every patient to be shunted to a ward bed within four hours of admission to A&E – sometimes better care will be had in A&E from appropriately specialised doctors and nurses who are actually on the spot. Stabilisation of an emergency condition does not always follow a nice consistent pathway. Sometimes weird shit happens and the process of making the patient safe takes longer than four hours.
The junior doctors problem, on the other hand, is a real issue. Jeremy Hunt (who has taken over in the UK from the irritating but generally harmless James Blunt as “the only man alive who is his own rhyming slang,”*) has decided that hospitals should offer a full seven day service as opposed to a full five day service and emergency cover at weekends. That’s fine. I actually agree. So he’s increasing NHS funding to cover the costs?
Well, no.
The things is, employing more junior doctors is expensive, but it doesn’t stop there. You also have to increase the numbers of the 9-5 plus on-call services – radiographers and X Ray techs, phlebotamists, Scientific Officers to staff the labs and process samples, Endoscopists, Transplant Coordinators, Dieticians, physiotherapists, occupational therapists – the list goes on and on.
It doesn’t include the nurses. We’ve been providing a full 24/7 service since forever. We’re the only group that does so.
For those of us who do or have worked in the NHS it is very, very clear that the service is under political attack. Funding is being cut, services are being whittled down. In the words of the great “Yes, Minister”, “salami tactics” are being employed. Slice away a tiny bit at a time, a bit so small, so insignificant that no reasonable person could really object. Then slice again and again. Argue that private companies run things more efficiently (I’ve worked in the private and public sectors in the UK and my response to this is a stunned, “Buh? Wha?”) so bring in private companies to manage sections of the NHS. Amazingly enough, these sections rapidly run into problems when a style of management is installed that is more used to measuring performance by profit.
Study after study has shown that clinically the NHS is actually extremely efficient. That’s been the case since the late 1970s when an efficiency rating of over 90% was calculated. Money has been wasted by being diverted to a plethora of “management consultants” and senior managers sucking down what is, by NHS standards, huge amounts of money. Of course, they aren’t actually good managers – if they were they’d be earning at least twice the amount in industry.
We spend less per capita on health care than any other western European nation. The big problem we have is that we have just lost the last generation to remember what things were like before nationalised health care, where if you were ill you just got on with stuff (and got iller and iller and sometimes died) because medicine and hospital care was for the privileged classes. People now have quite literally no idea how much their birth control, antibiotics, insulin and surgery will cost them in insurance if we move towards (god help us) a US style (lack of a) health care system.
The politicians don’t care (except for Corbyn) because they are all rich boys with Daddy’s money to fall back on. In their eyes the NHS is just a drain on the national purse. Think of all the handouts they could give to their cronies with that cash!
The depressing thing is that the media folks, being generally from a privileged background themselves, are uninclined to question this too deeply. No one is looking at what the dissolution of the NHS would mean for ordinary people. There is a sad lack of incisive investigative journalism.
So, yes, those of us who recognise this covert attack on the NHS are deeply worried.
*yes, I know, but it’s a common UK joke.
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