Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Hospital pass: The NHS is on life support

The cabinet meeting this week turned into a surprisingly frank conversation about the National Health Service. Rishi Sunak was asked to give his thoughts on the future of health and social care. He gave a candid assessment of the dangers of being blind to the NHS’s many shortcomings. It’s political blasphemy to criticise the NHS. But once Sunak started, others joined in. Jacob Rees-Mogg added his concerns. Steve Barclay, the new Cabinet Office minister, and Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, also contributed.

By the end of the meeting, the ministers had heard each other say out loud what they have long been thinking: that the NHS, as it stands, is failing. The government will soon be pouring almost half of day-to-day public service spending into a system which is falling short of what patients (and tax-payers) deserve. The money is there: since extra spending on the NHS became a Brexit mission statement, Boris Johnson has seen to that. The UK now spends almost 13 per cent of its economic output on healthcare — the highest in Europe. But the results are not coming through, and people are starting to notice.

The arrival of the Omicron variant has, yet again, raised the prospect of people being asked to stay at home — not so much to protect each other but, to use the language of lockdowns, to ‘protect the NHS’. Covid-19 is no longer dominating the health service: vaccines work, and patients with the virus currently occupy only 5 per cent of hospital beds, a far cry from 31 per cent in January. Things are relatively under control — for now.

Still, something is going wrong. In many ways, NHS emergency services are harder to access now than they were last year. The average ambulance wait time (for a non-life-threatening call) is now nearly an hour — twice what it was in the depths of the pandemic.

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