The UK NHS, an organisation more dysfunctional it would be hard to imagine, is planning to compound its abject failures by dealing with one of its major problems by creating another. Like the captain of a sinking ship who moves his passengers and crew to another ship with an even bigger hole below the waterline, the NHS plans to move thousands of patients it can no longer be bothered looking after to nursing homes.
Of our rapidly declining number of NHS beds—down by 80,000 since 2000—it is reckoned that 13,000 could be freed up by moving patients to nursing and residential homes. It begs the question of where our current ‘Health’ Secretary Steve Barclay MP was in 2020 when the same tactic was used to clear the way for the projected hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 patients. Those patients never materialised.
However, what took place at the receiving end, in the nursing and residential homes where the Covid clear out patients ended up, was a humanitarian disaster and a crime against humanity. According to an article in the BMJ: ‘up to March 2020. A total of 57 860 excess deaths were reported, 44% of which (25 611) were in care homes or hospices. Of the 25 611 excess deaths in care homes and hospices, 61% (15 623) were due to covid-19, while 6267 were from dementia and 2358 from ill defined conditions’. Clearly that went so well that the UK government wants to do it again.
The declining number of NHS hospital beds in the UK has put us second to bottom of countries in Europe in terms of beds per 1000 people; only Sweden lies below us. The decline in beds represents a decline of 8.3% between 2010 and 2020 and this has been presided over by a succession of governments and NHS managers. The doctrine of care being delivered in the community whereby NHS funding mainly goes to community care and is then ‘purchased’ from hospitals, which sounds good, has not worked. While the NHS may have reached a series of political targets it has almost constantly been unable to reach its targets for delivery of care. Moreover, even though we have a winter care crisis every year, the policies that have been pursued over recent decades have not prepared us for these – demonstrably.
While I sense the despair over what is happening in the NHS, I do not sense the anger. We were massively conned in 2020 until well into 2022 into taking a series of measures which were designed to ‘save the NHS’ and even to save lives, at great cost to ourselves and the country. The irony in our present situation seemingly goes over the heads of commentators in the mainstream media, or they are too frightened to point it out.
The only solution that those on the left seem to have to the present NHS crisis is more funding. When the massive amount of money poured into the NHS is pointed out to them, they refer to funding declining in ‘relative terms’, but this simply is not true. Ignoring the unusual ‘Covid years’ the funding allocated to the NHS pre-Covid was £156 billion; it is now a staggering £184 billion, £40 million of which is spent on diversity officers. I have no idea how many NHS hospitals beds would be funded by scrapping NHS diversity officers (along with several other tranches of HR officers and general non-clinical busybodies) but it would be a start. Anything to keep vulnerable people out of nursing and residential homes.

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