According to a government-commissioned research, a “decade of neglect” by consecutive Conservative administrations has undermined the NHS to the point that it will be unable to address the 7 million-strong backlog of care.
According to a research by the King’s Fund health think tank, years of underfunding the health sector and failing to solve its escalating workforce crisis have left it with insufficient numbers of employees, supplies, and facilities to carry out the necessary number of operations.
Ministers won’t be able to fulfil important commitments on ending consistently long delays because of the UK’s low public finances, fatigued medical personnel, and a wave of NHS strikes this winter, the think tank claims.
Given that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) ordered the assessment in the latter part of last year, the findings are especially embarrassing for the Conservatives. They criticise the effects of the austerity agenda that David Cameron started in 2010 and Theresa May continues on the NHS.
The report paints a dismal picture of the strategies Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour governments employed in the 2000s to solve the excruciatingly lengthy wait times for care they assumed in 1997.
Covid undoubtedly made the situation in the NHS and social care worse, but ultimately, we are paying for a decade of carelessness, according to Richard Murray, chief executive of the King’s Fund.
Covid undoubtedly made the situation in the NHS and social care worse, but ultimately, we are paying for a decade of carelessness, according to Richard Murray, chief executive of the King’s Fund.
“The few infusions of money during the years of austerity following 2010 were at most intended to fund [the service’s] ongoing operating expenses. Due to a lack of long-term investment, the health and care system is constrained by a staffing shortage, equipment shortage, and deteriorating infrastructure. These significant difficulties have long been apparent. Many of the same problems that plagued the NHS in 2000 still exist in 2022, including intolerably long wait times and a service that is hindered by a lack of workers.
The cost of living crises, employee strikes, and a backdrop of a fragile economy and frail public finances have all been added to it.
The paper is based on the first comprehensive academic study conducted in the UK on how governments and NHS administrators can deal with current conditions, when large numbers of patients are once again experiencing lengthy delays in receiving planned medical care.
Its conclusions are based on an examination of the available waiting time evidence and, in particular, on interviews with 14 experts, many of whom were instrumental in Labour’s successful effort to end lengthy waits.
The unnamed expert stated: “We have virtually experienced managed decline over the past 10 years. This is not an issue with Covid. This is an issue with austerity.
According to the research, the NHS’s loss of capacity is mostly attributable to Cameron’s decision to limit annual budget increases from Labour’s 3.6% to an average of just 1.5%. The service’s performance in relation to many waiting time targets put in place by Labour started to decline in 2015 and has become worse every year afterwards.
The research was released a few days after the most recent official data revealed that there were now 7.2 million individuals on England’s non-urgent hospital waiting list, setting a new record. A hip or knee replacement, cataract surgery, or hernia repair, for example, should take no more than a year to complete, yet 410,983 of those patients have been waiting longer than that.
The leaders of Britain’s A&E doctors as well as NHS ambulance service bosses in England have voiced acute concern about the number of patients coming to harm, and even dying, as a direct result of waiting for an ambulance to arrive or to get into A&E or from there into a hospital bed.
The 81-page document is being published later this week. It says the NHS’s lack of resources, combined with the different political, financial and economic circumstances that apply today, mean that politically important promises made earlier this year in NHS England’s “elective recovery plan” are highly unlikely to be met.
They included pledges to end waits of two years, 18 months and one year by the summer, next spring and 2025 respectively.
The government has promised to put £8bn into tackling the backlog and NHS England has set up dozens of community diagnostic centres to help speed up patients’ tests and treatment.
In his response to the Guardian about the report, Blair criticised all six of the Tory administrations since Labour lost power in 2010, for deviating from the three strategies he used to eradicate delays: reform, investment and political focus. He said that change of approach damaged the NHS’s ability to deliver care within established waiting time targets.
“These key elements were, and I believe still are, essential in improving public services. Since Labour left office, each pillar of these principles has been weakened in regard to our health service,” Blair said. “As the report says, waiting lists are now at their highest level since the 18-week referral to treatment measure was introduced in 2004, as well as a collapse in urgent care.”
He also took aim at ministers’ repeated efforts to depict the massive waiting list for care – which already stood at 4.4 million when the pandemic hit in spring 2020 – as “the Covid backlog”. Blair said: “This isn’t a result of Covid, but chronic underinvestment and mismanagement exacerbated by Covid.”
He added: “The lessons of that [Labour government] period, which ended with satisfaction levels with the NHS at record highs, remain the same because they are lessons about governing: the government and prime minister make it a priority, devoting time and energy; a policy is put in place which is based on what works; and then there is a relentless effort across government to ensure delivery.”
Blair said the King’s Fund’s findings “must act as a political wake-up call to renew efforts to reform the NHS, give this reform the political focus and grip it needs and align this with the right strategic investment”.
This is not an issue with Covid. This is an issue with austerity.
According to the research, the NHS’s loss of capacity is mostly attributable to Cameron’s decision to limit annual budget increases from Labour’s 3.6% to an average of just 1.5%. The service’s performance in relation to many waiting time targets put in place by Labour started to decline in 2015 and has become worse every year afterwards.
The research was released a few days after the most recent official data revealed that there were now 7.2 million individuals on England’s non-urgent hospital waiting list, setting a new record. A hip or knee replacement, cataract surgery, or hernia repair, for example, should take no more than a year to complete, yet 410,983 of those patients have been waiting longer than that.
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