22nd November 2021

One million pounds a day of your taxes
That’s how much management consultants are costing in the privately-run “NHS” Test and Trace system. At the end of October it employed 1,230 consultants. Test and trace has average daily contractor rates of £1,100, costing us £1,353,000 a day.

Patients stuck at surgeries due to ambulance delays
Patients experiencing life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks, strokes or major breathing problems are becoming trapped for many hours in GP surgeries, unable to get hospital treatment because ambulances are taking so long to turn up.

Record 5.8 million waiting for hospital treatment
Many hospitals can now cope only with patients coming through emergency departments. A total of 5.8 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of September. This is the highest number since records began in August 2007.

A coming winter crisis?
Underfunding throughout the 2010s meant that the service was increasingly ill-equipped to cope with the rising prevalence of chronic illnesses. Even in November 2019, several months before Covid-19 hit, NHS England was described by senior leaders as being “on its knees”. No wonder, now, the CEO of the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, said that “many hospitals are only able to cope now with people coming through emergency departments”.

Renationalise the NHS
Here’s a petition to rid our NHS of a bloated bureaucracy of commissioners, accountant and lawyers, and of private profit-hungry healthcare firms, and allow most funding to get to the medical frontline, to pay for more nurses, doctors and hospital beds. For all our sakes, sign it.