10th February 2022

Denied emergency care twice
Look what the Tories are doing to our NHS. Now you may get emergency care only from the A&E nearest to your home. A woman with severe burns was advised owing to a 5 hour wait to go to another A&E (Rochdale), but then was told by Fairfield Hospital in Bury that they wouldn’t treat her, “go back to Rochdale”.

NHS patients ‘warehoused’ in “care hotels”
Inadequate care home provision in England’s disastrous social care service has forced NHS England to invent “care hotels” – hotels that offer so-called “domicillary care” owqing to a shortage of homecare workers. In this one in Plymouth a bath is full of clinical waste.

Do we need management consultants to plan backlog care?
NHS England will fund integrated care systems to spend up to £42 million on management consultancies help with elective recovery plans. Wouldn’t spending this huge sum on employing more doctors and nurses be more effective? There are 100,000 vacancies in the NHS.

Repairing the NHS: ministers are the problem
New waiting list targets will achieve nothing if the government refuses to commit to workforce planning. “The truth is that Tory resistance to forward planning, as well as insufficient spending, lies at the heart of the NHS’s difficulties.”

27% rise in NHS spending on private healthcare
This article, behind a paywall, says in down to the pandemic. No, it’s down to a decade of underfunding: the NHS was totally unprepared for a pandemic. Despite cash boosts in 2018 and 2019 the NHS budgets rose on average just 1.4% per year, compared to 3.7% average rises since the NHS was established, and an average of over 5% throught the Blair/Brown eras.