Stretched to breaking point?

As winter approaches, and serious respiratory infections and viruses are expected to soar, A & E services are anticipated to be stretched to a breaking point in the coming months.

 
Indeed, 22,000 extra patients turned up to A & E this week as compared to the same week last year.

 
That’s why it’s particularly important, as both a long-standing NHS campaign and health secretary Jeremy Hunt himself have repeatedly advised, that patients only seek hospital services in the most urgent cases. All others should see their GP.

 
It would seem, however, that Hunt feels perfectly justified in giving guidance to the public on the one hand, and altogether ignoring this advice himself.

 
During health questions at the House of Commons on Tuesday (November 25), Hunt admitted, “I took my own children to an A&E department at the weekend precisely because I did not want to wait until later on to take them to see a GP.”

 
Parents everywhere will know what it’s like to have a sick child – and could well understand Hunt’s actions. But this is no ordinary parent.

 
Labour shadow health secretary Andy Burnham criticised Hunt’s statement, saying that a concerned parent’s worries are perfectly understandable but that “[Hunt’s admission] appears to be at odds with long standing advice to the public and in advance of a potentially difficult winter in the NHS, could add pressure to already overstretched A & E services.”

 
The “potentially difficult winter” for the health service is already kicking off to a chilling early start – the second week of November saw more emergency admissions in English hospitals than in any other week in NHS history, despite the mild weather.

 
And a growing number of hospitals have already declared “black alerts”—the highest level – indicating that bed capacity has been reached and additional patients would have to be sent to different hospitals.

 
But the extent of the NHS’ looming winter of discontent has not yet been fully revealed, precisely because the coalition government doesn’t want the public to know – the publication of the health service’s weekly “winter pressures situation reports” have been inexplicably delayed.

 
Hunt’s admitting to taking his children to A & E came in response to a question about improving access to GP surgeries.
But if previous Tory health policy is anything to go by, then GP access will continue to be stretched – it was the Tories who scrapped Labour’s GP targets that guaranteed patients would see a GP within 48 hours.

 
While much has been made about the coalition’s pledge to afford every patient GP access seven days a week, 12 hours a day by 2020, the exact same pledge was made before the previous election, with hardly any progress made since.

 
In fact, seeing a GP now has become more difficult than ever.

 
Unite head of health Rachael Maskell argued that the Hunt incident was perfectly indicative of the Tory-induced NHS crisis.

 
“The health secretary has illustrated himself the crisis he has driven the NHS into,” she said. “Starving primary care of the resources it needs, coupled with the shambolic reorganisation of the NHS, will bring serious pressure to A & Es up and down the country this winter.”

 
The pressures GPs face working for the NHS – where pay is low and stress is high – have prompted many of them to flee abroad, where working conditions are much better. A report released earlier this week found that the number of GPs moving abroad to work has doubled under the coalition.

 
And as UNITElive reported in October, the overall GP workforce is shrinking rapidly, as many GPs are poised to retire from the service, while not enough medical graduates have opted to enter general practitioner training.

 
Dr Ron Singer, who chairs the doctors’ section of Unite confirmed the enormous strains GPs are under, arguing unreasonable political promises will only make the situation worse.

 
“The plain fact is that the UK has too few GPs and other doctors,” he said. “We have one of the lowest number of doctors and nurses per head of population in Europe. Forcing GPs to work 12-14 hours a day is bad for them, bad for patients and bad for the efficiency of the NHS.”

 
Maskell agreed. “We see our GPs working all hours to get on top of their long lists of patients under ever growing pressures,” she said.

 
“This government must be held to account at the ballot box next May for the chaos they have brought to our NHS,” Maskell added.