It's been a long time getting this bad. And it won't be quick to repair the damage. At the same time that our population has been getting older, needing more care, more often, and for longer, we have had a hostile government.
"Why is the NHS in crisis, despite the fact that the UK now spends about as much money on it as peer countries? Well, a big part of the reason is that important word “now”. The NHS now gets about as much money as its peers, but in the past decade, UK health spending has fallen short of levels in similar countries. This isn’t particularly complex or surprising. If you don’t clean your house for 10 years, and then you start to pay a cleaner to spend two hours a week tidying it like your neighbours do, it will be some time indeed before your house is anywhere near as clean as your neighbours’ homes.
As Clive Cookson and Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe explain in their excellent primer on the state of the health service, an awful lot of the NHS crisis is as simple as an absence of money. If you don’t train enough doctors, nurses and paramedics for a decade, there is a hard limit on what you can achieve quickly just by increasing the amount of money you spend."
FT.com
Our ambulances are stacked up outside our hospitals waiting for someone to leave. Why is this? Why do we have too few beds?
Because that's what we wanted....
Deliberate policy.
www.politico.eu
