A Decade Of Cuts Cripples The NHS

Omicron is a super-spreader. It is sweeping the country. Anyone not fully jabbed or immune through recent infection, is likely to get it. Some  will need medical help and will require hospitalisation. A few will sadly die. Even those fully vaccinated can get this latest variant,  but although they can transmit it, they are unlikely to get other than a mild illness. We have to remind ourselves that this is a pandemic, not a plague.

We have, or claim to have, in the NHS the finest health service in the world. Yet it is on the brink because of Covid, not because the staff are not working well beyond the extra mile  making each and every one a hero of modern times, but because the organisation is under funded. It has suffered more than a decade of cuts in real terms. Both its funding models and organisational structures are deeply flawed.

The consequences are unacceptable waiting lists for non-Covid diagnosis, treatments and procedures, to the point where the system has in effect broken down. Even a GP appointment is nearly impossible in many areas. If Covid vanished tomorrow the crisis would still run on for years. Unless something radical is done. What that should be is for another time.

But meanwhile praise the people who struggle to maintain our health service. They are not to blame. The current political class, perhaps the most incompetent in our history, is. The first thing we have to to is make them own responsibility for a long building mess very much of their making.