‘No time to waste’  

As prime minister Theresa May continues to ignore the mounting funding problems faced by the NHS — whose ongoing crisis was most shockingly exemplified by the story of a sick baby being treated on two plastic chairs pushed together to form a bed — top NHS boss railed against continuing government austerity that’s risking lives.

NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens told a public accounts committee on Wednesday (January 11) that the prime minister’s insistent claim that the NHS had received more funding from the government than it had asked for was patently untrue.

“It is a matter of fact that, like probably every part of public services, we got less than we asked for [in the spending review], so it would be stretching it to say the NHS got more,” Stevens said.

Stevens outlined just how drastically the NHS will be underfunded.

“Over the next three years, funding is going to be highly constrained,” he told the committee.

“In 2018-19, real-terms NHS spending per person in England is going to go down, 10 years after Lehman Brothers [collapsed] and austerity began.

“We all understand why that is, but let’s not pretend that’s not placing huge pressure on the service.”

Stevens took aim at Theresa May’s past experience as home secretary by noting that running the NHS was not comparable to running the criminal justice system.

“In a sense what the NHS is being asked to do is to reverse engineer from a sum of money that Parliament has voted for it, to say, ‘All right then, what are you going to do?’,” Stevens pointed out. “We cannot change the age of Britain, but our demands are quite different from, say, the criminal justice system.”

‘No longer viable’

Chief executive of NHS Providers Chris Hopson also gave evidence and went even further than Stevens, warning that if austerity continues the NHS as we know it will no longer be viable.

“I think the biggest concern, to be frank, is if we carry on the current trajectory, we begin to bring into question the entire sustainability of the NHS model,” he told the committee.

He recounted a recent meeting he had with NHS trust chairs and chief executives.

“We had 130 of them in a meeting in December, and for the first time in four years we had a serious conversation about the point at which public confidence in the NHS model of care – delivered free at the point of use based on clinical need, not ability to pay – comes into question,” Hopson noted.

Stevens’ and Hopson’s testimony for the public accounts committee came just after a fiery PMQs earlier in the day, with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn highlighting that the Red Cross had claimed parts of the NHS could be described as being in a “humanitarian crisis”.

May dismissed these claims as overblown and shrugged off incidents such as the baby being treated on hospital chairs as isolated incidents.

But a growing number of professional medical organisations, including the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Nurses have all said that the health service is being overwhelmed.

The latest figures show that A&E departments have shut and turned down patients 140 times in December alone. A third of NHS trusts in England have said they’ve issued alerts because they cannot cope with demand.

As a cold snap pummels the UK this week, demand is expected to increase even more. The mother of the child who was being treated for acute tonsillitis on hospital chairs due to lack of beds, Rose Newman, railed against the prime minister for dismissing the incident at PMQs.

‘Laughable’

“Theresa May said she accepted there had been a few instances where things like this happen,” she told the Mirror. “That is laughable.

“In that waiting room, there was a woman sitting opposite me, head in hands, I don’t know what had happened to her but she had been there for eight hours,” she added.

“Another baby, younger than [my son] Jack, had a big rash across her, had to be put on a drip, and they’d been waiting more than six hours.

“So ‘a few instances’, I saw more than that in one day in that one hospital. It’s not a few instances, I can’t believe she even said that. She needs to wake up.”

Unite national office for health Colenzo Jarrett-Thorpe agreed. “No one knows more about the disaster the NHS is facing from lack of funding than those on the frontline – nurses, paramedics, speech and language therapists, clinical psychologists among others,” he said.

“Each and every one of our members working in the health service have all told us the same story –that if the NHS doesn’t get the funding it so desperately needs, more and more patients’ lives will be on the line.

“Even NHS boss Simon Stevens, who has never been one to exaggerate, has told MPs that the service is at breaking point as funding becomes ever more constrained. That the prime minister continues to ignore the man appointed to run NHS England demonstrates she is in denial and not focused on finding real solutions to these mounting problems.”

Lives in danger  

Jarrett-Thorpe continued. “Among countries with comparable economies, the UK spends a smaller proportion of its GDP on health – we can afford to spend more,” he added. “Properly funding the NHS is only a matter of political will and we at Unite call on the government to stop burying their heads in the sand and take decisive action. Lives are in serious danger and there’s no time to waste.”

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey told the Independent that the savings the NHS is being asked to make is also fuelling the health service crisis.

“Health economists have consistently said that by forcing the NHS to make £20bn in savings by 2020, the government is driving this service into crisis,” he said.

“The government knows all too well that the funding for the service falls far short of what is needed to meet the challenges presented by the monstrous debts carried by hospital trusts, from an ageing population and from the pitiful absence of a reliable, decent social care service, which is urgently needed to take the pressure off the frontline NHS.”