Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Could the NHS meltdown lead to another Mid Staffs scandal?

Matilda played with her mother’s stethoscopes when she was a child. As a teenager, she pored over anatomy books. She devoted her early twenties to medical school and has been cramming for postgraduate exams well into her thirties. Last summer, she jacked it all in. Being a doctor ‘was turning me into a bad person,’ she explained to her nonplussed friends.

Many medics will recognise Matilda’s fear that her job was making her less caring, both to her patients and her family. The meltdown in the NHS is leaving doctors feeling even more burnt out than during the pandemic. The effect this is having on patients is frightening.

Doctors and nurses already have an abnormal relationship to pain

A common term in the medical world is ‘moral injury’, where workers feel the work they are having to do contradicts their own values. Talk to any emergency doctor, and they’ll say they are unable to provide what they would even consider the bare minimum standard of care to patients coming through their hospital doors. That regular sense of disappointment, coupled with total exhaustion from the last few years, can leave a long and dangerous legacy.

Healthcare workers regularly struggle with ‘compassion fatigue’, where the toll of seeing patients dying before their time starts to numb them. In a healthy work environment, they have time to process that and to take breaks. At the moment, with many trusts asking staff to cancel their annual leave and shifts being so busy it is difficult to go to the toilet – let alone have a short breather over lunch – there is no time to decompress. 

Instead, the numbing continues, and experts in patient safety are worried about what that will mean for healthcare. The gravest scandal in the NHS in recent years is the cruelty and needless deaths at the Stafford Hospital between 2005 and 2009.



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