A bit of an NHS 75th Birthday rant!

The NHS is 75 years old. Happy birthday, NHS! Will it see many more birthdays? That is the question. Here’s something, probably from the Guardian:

“Most frontline medics believe ministers are seeking to “destroy the NHS” because they have starved it of cash and mistreated its staff, the leader of Britain’s doctors has said.

Prof Philip Banfield also warned that the health service, which on Wednesday will mark the 75th anniversary of its creation, is so fragile that it may not survive until its 80th.

Banfield, the British Medical Association’s chair of council, mounted an unusually strong attack on the government’s handling of the NHS in an interview with the Guardian.

“This government has to demonstrate that it is not setting out to destroy the NHS, which it is failing to do at this point in time,” he said. “It is a very common comment that I hear, from both doctors and patients, that this government is consciously running the NHS down. [And] if you run it down far enough, it’s going to lead to destruction.

“You’ll struggle to find someone [among doctors] on the frontline who thinks otherwise, because that’s what it feels like.””

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been having his say as well. This is from today’s Guardian:

“The NHS now requires fundamental reform or, eventually, support for it will diminish. As in the 1990s, the NHS must either change or decline,” he writes in the foreword to a new report from his Tony Blair Institute thinktank, which sets out ideas for safeguarding the NHS’s future.

He adds: “Change is never easy and requires brave political leadership. If we do not act, the NHS will continue down a path of decline, to the detriment of our people and our economy.”

Every patient should be given a new online personal health account, hosted by the NHS app, Blair proposes. That would let people see a record of every test, appointment and treatment they had had and would collate personal health data, including from wearable devices such as Fitbits. It would also allow the NHS to send information designed to make people more responsible for their own health, as well as details of services on offer from private healthcare firms.”

Some very good ideas Mr Blair! But he seems to believe we need to expand the role of the private sector and make much more use of private healthcare providers to cut waiting times. Now, I don’t have a thinktank but as I understand it one of our major problems is a shortage of doctors.  Many of the doctors in private clinics are the same ones as in the NHS hospitals. So if they have more private work they will have less time for NHS work. I know people who have seen the same consultant privately as in the NHS; they could afford the private treatment and so jumped ahead of the NHS queue. I also have a friend who was advised by her consultant that going private for her hip replacement would not advance her appointment date by much as he had a waiting list in both areas! 

There is only so much treatment ‘cake’ to go round. If you take a slice from one sector and add it to the other, it’s still a slice of the same cake. It risks becoming a kind of lottery, or a competition to see who can pay the most! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!