28.03.2024

More honesty about the crisis facing the NHS is urgently needed

Ambulances have faced six hour delays queuing outside hospitals to handover patients even though hospitals have expanded their numbers of beds massively they still cannot find enough room.

In the past two weeks hospitals in London and across the southeast have had to declare major incidents, cancel operations and transfer patients to NHS trusts hundreds of miles away.

Some have struggled to deliver the volume of oxygen needed by patients sick with coronavirus who are being cared for on makeshift wards set up in any spare room the hospitals can find.

This is not a normal winter for the NHS. Many staff on the ground report extreme working conditions. Nurses have described struggling to sleep at night, others have revealed they suffer vivid nightmarish dreams about them and their loved ones being in intensive care.

NHS England’s medical director Steve Powis told reporters the NHS was under “immense pressure” on Monday as he marked the beginning of the rollout of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.

On Sunday, in comments that angered many of his staff, the chief executive of the London Ambulance Service Garett Emerson said the service was just about coping.

The four chief medical officers for the UK issued a statement warning that there was a “material risk” the NHS could be overwhelmed within the next 21 days.

In London and the southeast, the NHS was overwhelmed back during the Christmas weekend and it has only worsened since. England now has 40 per cent more patients in hospital than there were at the peak of the first wave of the virus in April.

In Kent, the numbers of critical care patients far exceeded normal levels with clinicians telling The Independent there were patients on wards who they would normally have in intensive care but there just wasn’t the space.

Hospitals are desperately short of staff and stretching nursing to patient ratios to unsafe levels with large London hospitals appealing for staff to work extra shifts. Leave has been cancelled for many and surgeons have been drafted in to help out on wards with basic care tasks to help free up nurses to do their expert work.

And it’s not just London – hospitals in Lincolnshire declared a critical incident on Tuesday due to the number of coronavirus patients being admitted. Hospital bosses in Birmingham have issued warnings over the pressure on nurses in its critical care departments.

For many frontline NHS staff, the hints of extreme pressure by the chief medics and others don’t go far enough. Staff feel a growing resentment towards their own executives over what some see as an unwillingness to publicly accept the situation the NHS is in.

It is perhaps politically unpalatable for senior figures to openly admit the health service is unable to cope. But Coronavirus denialists and lockdown sceptics are filling the vacuum and perpetuating the myth that the NHS is struggling no more than it always does in winter.

The fact is the health service went into this crisis weaker than it needed to have been. Successive years of underfunding left it with fewer beds and staff than most western European nations.

The public don’t need the truth hidden from them. NHS staff want to see real leadership from their bosses. No health service could withstand the onslaught from coronavirus unscathed.

Being more honest about the weaknesses of the health service and the reality of what is happening is urgently needed. It will silence the denialists and simultaneously show staff the leadership get the situation they are in.

It also serves to make the case for a properly resourced health service in the longer term.

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