The controversy over the cataclysmic changes to the National Health Service continues unabated. Combined with the swingeing savings that it is being forced to make, there is a very real possibility that the NHS will soon be on the brink of collapse. It is obvious to everyone, except the current Government, that pushing ahead with enormous structural changes at the same time that £20 billion of efficiency savings are being made, is total lunacy and can only wreck the health service.
Even the National Quality Board, a body set up by the Department of Health in 2009 to help improve quality across the NHS, is concerned that the quality and safety of care and even patients’ lives could be put at risk.
In its latest report – which was published without any publicity by the Department of Health – the board warns that previous, less dramatic reforms had a “negative effect on the delivery of services because of a loss of managerial focus” with “high levels of stress, anxiety, staff turnovers, and lower job satisfaction.” All of which, it adds, are “a key risk factor for serious service failure”.
Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association’s hospital consultant committee, has even warned that care for some patients could return to “what we thought we had left behind when we founded the NHS in 1948”. Yet few people remember the days when, unless you could pay privately for treatment – both at the GP and in hospital – you had to depend on the last resort municipal hospitals, which were on the verge of bankruptcy and survived only through fundraising, wealthy benefactors and the goodwill of consultants who gave their services free.
But ignoring this widespread opposition, dire warnings from health experts and growing evidence of a return to lengthy waiting lists that is already happening, the Government is pressing ahead with its unprecedented and contentious changes.
I don’t want to be a victim of a cash-strapped, over-worked NHS, where staff are demoralised and disheartened. I don’t want to have to depend on a GP who is forced to put cash before care. As I get older and the possibility of needing medical care becomes more of a reality, I want to know it is available. Which is why, with a heavy heart and a deep reluctance, I have decided to pay into a private health scheme – not one of the big multinational providers, but a small mutual healthcare organisation which will pay for me to have diagnostic tests and treatment if there is a delay in receiving them in the NHS. And I am seriously afraid that soon schemes like this will be a necessity rather than a luxury – that people will have no option but to pay into some insurance scheme as the NHS is turned into a mere safety net.
We risk a situation where NHS hospitals, like the public hospitals in the United States, exist in a state of virtual bankruptcy, and where patients, unless they have private medical insurance, are forced to accept second-class care. Where waiting lists return to pre-1997 levels and where 18 months delay for diagnostic tests are considered normal. Where patients expect to have their operations cancelled because of lack of beds and where people are denied drugs because of lack of funds.
As the Government gives private health care firms a much greater chance to treat NHS patients and as these profit-driven firms cherry pick patients with the simplest conditions, so the NHS will be unable to compete. Left with only the complex, expensive conditions, many NHS hospitals could face closure.
The mutual healthcare provider I have joined describes itself as acting “as a complement to the services available on the NHS, and not as a replacement for it.” Scarily, I fear the day is drawing near when it will be forced to change its ideology, as there will be no NHS services to complement.
