Last year Jeremy Hunt, the ex Health Secretary and current Chancellor stated that he wants to eliminate the 150 avoidable deaths that occur in the NHS every week. Unlike death from diseases such as cancer or heart disease, these arise from basic medical error. Fix the errors and “every single one of them is immediately preventable. We are not waiting for a miracle cure. They could be stopped right now if best practice were followed.”
Move forward a year and not only has he not done anything about it the problem is worse.
“There seems to be almost a battle of machismo and denial going on.”
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) January 3, 2023
Dr Ian Higginson, VP of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, asks NHS and political leaders if there’s “an acceptable number” of patients dying as a result of delays and crisis in the NHS.@RCEM_VP pic.twitter.com/3OXcc0bMvz
NHS staff being forced to witness our patients dying in corridors, in cupboards, on floors and in stranded ambulances. Why? Because this government has made a political decision that there are an ‘acceptable number of deaths’ within the NHS funding crisis that they will permit.
To the collective despair of frontline staff, the government’s actual, as opposed to rhetorical, response to the humanitarian crisis gripping the NHS is a perverse inversion of everything the chancellor purports to hold dear.
First, Downing Street tried to ignore it. The day after the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), Adrian Boyle, estimated that between 300 and 500 people were dying avoidable deaths every week as a result of the total collapse of emergency services, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, was chirpily tweeting about the merits of parkrun.
Next, the government tried denial, with one of Rishi Sunak’s spin doctors flatly refusing to accept the assertion that the NHS was in crisis. Perhaps to them, political spinning seems like a game. But as someone who has to hear the moans and face the anguish, I would say that attempting to dismiss real people’s avoidable deaths – their actual, unnecessary experiences of misery, indignity and terminal suffering – is a form of dishonesty so stone-cold disgraceful it shouldn’t come within a million miles of government.
The government claims it has given the NHS all the funding it needs. It hasn’t. It lied. Sunak stated in his new year speech this week that since September, “we’ve put half a billion pounds into what’s called early discharge, to help move people into the community this winter”. He hasn’t. Only £200m – 40% – of that emergency funding has actually been given to the NHS and local authorities. The remaining £300m has not materialised and will not be disbursed until, possibly, late January.
With one in seven hospital beds across England occupied by medically fit patients without the care packages they need to safely leave hospital, that is unforgivable. Because every bed space we can possibly release is quite literally a matter of life and death for the patients at home with heart attacks and strokes waiting for ambulances that never come.
Be under no illusions. If it wanted to, the government could reduce the avoidable death toll this minute. It could fund the block booking of care home beds – as it did during Covid – to discharge thousands of medically fit patients from hospitals. It could mobilise an emergency crisis force of volunteer carers to help support patients at home after discharge. It could end the insanity of the pension trap for senior doctors that forces consultants to cut back their hours unwillingly or else face punitive six-figure tax bills. Above all – if it cared about the endemic burnout and hopelessness that propels so many desperate staff these days into quitting the NHS they used to cherish – it could once, just once, break its 12-year obsession with curating NHS headlines, and tell the truth.
This government is allowing people to die for ideological reasons
and because they are not inclined to save people when they know that personally they can avoid the suffering that tens of millions of others are actually or potentially at risk of.
They get preferential care if they or their close family and friends are impacted and that apart from conning the electorate is all they care about.
Penny Lane
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