Government-Commissioned Paper12 Dec 2022 20:14
..pinpoints budget squeeze as key reason for National Health Service's loss of capacity.
A “DECADE OF NEGLECT” BY SUCCESSIVE CONSERVATIVE ADMINISTRATIONS has weakened the NHS to the point that it will not be able to tackle the 7 million-strong backlog of care, a government-commissioned report has concluded.
The paper by the King’s Fund health thinktank says years of denying funding to the health service and failing to address its growing workforce crisis has left it with too few staff, too little equipment and too many outdated buildings to perform the amount of surgery needed.
The UK’s poor public finances, health service staff suffering from exhaustion, and a wave of NHS strikes this winter will also lead to ministers being unable to deliver key pledges on eradicating routinely long waits, the thinktank says.
The findings are ESPECIALLY EMBARASSING FOR CONSERVATIVES because the report was ordered by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) late last year. They are critical of the impact on the NHS of the austerity programme initiated by David Cameron in 2010 and continued by his successor, Theresa May.
The report draws an unfavourable contrast with the tactics used by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour governments in the 2000s to address the horrendously long waits for care they inherited in 1997.TH
“Though Covid certainly exacerbated the crisis in the NHS and social care, we are ultimately paying the price for a decade of neglect,” said the King’s Fund chief executive, Richard Murray.
“The sporadic injections of cash during the austerity years after 2010 were at best meant to cover [the service’s] day-to-day running costs. This dearth of long-term investment has led to a health and care system hamstrung by a lack of staff and equipment and crumbling buildings. These critical challenges have been obvious for years.
“The NHS in 2022 faces many of the same challenges it faced in 2000: unacceptably long waiting times and a service hobbled by staff shortages. To that is now added a cost of living crisis, industrial action by staff and a backdrop of a weak economy and weak public finances.”
The report is based on the first in-depth academic research undertaken in the UK into what measures ministers and NHS bosses can deploy to tackle situations such as those prevailing today, where massive numbers of patients are again facing long delays to access planned hospital care.
Its findings are based on a review of evidence around waiting times and, in particular, interviews with 14 experts, including many of the key figures IN LABOUR's SUCCESSFUL ERADICATION OF LONG WAITING LISTS.
“We have essentially had TEN YEARS OF MANAGED DECLINE (NO ****!) . THIS IS NOT A COVID PROBLEM. THIS IS AN AUSTERITY PROBLEM.”
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