Ministers cannot ignore the horrifying reality of the NHS crisis

Editorial: The spirit that drove policy and action through the Covid emergency needs to be summoned up once more – the figures for excess deaths are, after all, even higher now than at points in the pandemic

It is past time for the government to act (PA)

There comes a point in every crisis when the rather esoteric benefits of the resolute approach are far outweighed by the human costs of sticking to a policy that has far outlived its usefulness. So it was during the pandemic, when measures unprecedented in peacetime were implemented – and huge debts were run up to save lives. So it should be again, now, with the NHS crisis showing no signs of abating.

Even before the occasional and limited industrial action, the NHS was buckling under the strain. “Broken” is too strong, too politically loaded and too emotive a word to describe the situation now because many patients are still receiving superlative care from dedicated staff; but the stark facts and harrowing stories from the frontline speak for themselves.

The Independent’s comprehensive investigation of the state of the NHS reveals some of the more unpalatable truths that lie behind statistics that are already disturbing. Official data, for example, already shows that the number of patients waiting 12 hours in A&E rose by 44.1 per cent, just between November and December – some 54,532 fellow citizens, many in acute pain and suffering great anxiety.

As The Independent also revealed, internal NHS figures suggest the number of patients facing 12-hour “trolley waits” – the time that it takes to actually see a doctor or nurse – had exceeded 50,000 a week for the first time. An 89-year-old cancer patient was forced to wait 48 hours on a bed in a corridor for an urgent scan. A&E patients are being put on the same maternity wards as women because of a shortage of beds. As many as 500 people a week are dying as a result of the multiple problems with acute care: lack of staff, lack of available beds, shortage of care home places for prompt discharge, and ambulances waiting around rather than attending to calls.

It is past time for the government to act. Put at its simplest, ministers need to find the money to expand capacity and settle the pay disputes as soon as possible. There is no alternative. The spirit that drove policy and action through the Covid emergency needs to be summoned up once more – the figures for excess deaths are, after all, even higher now than at points in the pandemic.

Yet the best the obdurate health secretary, Steve Barclay, can do is to declare that he “doesn’t recognise” the most politically inconvenient figures, even though they are officially produced; and the “excess deaths” methodology has been widely accepted since at least the start of the pandemic. Rishi Sunak pleads that he has a plan – and his spin doctors confidently tell the public that he has got his head “under the bonnet” and is taking personal control. If so, then he must have got his finger stuck in the engine, so to speak, and it needs pulling out – pronto.

There are numerous stories of older and vulnerable people in pain and at risk of losing their lives, and the voters blame the government – not the unions and certainly not the NHS. In a pressured post-pandemic environment, with a backlog of cases and an upsurge in respiratory illnesses – including Covid – pressure is to be expected. Indeed, it was predictable, if not at this precise scale. But eventually the spikes in demand will pass and the service will be able to return to pre-pandemic levels of care. Waiting lists should come down, albeit not as much as the public would wish.

The NHS is not some relic of the 1940s, as often lazily alleged, because it has been reformed countless times and is one of the most efficient health systems in the world. The principles underlying it are timeless, and this is not the moment for those with an agenda to subvert it into a “safety net” for the poor rather than a universal service free at the point of delivery. The problems are obviously of resources – money – manpower shortages post-Brexit, and dealing with normal winter peaks in demand. Longer term, there is the challenge of an ageing population and no visible policy for social care of the elderly and people with disabilities.

But those problems are no different in kind to what the NHS has overcome before, and most remarkably during the outbreaks of coronavirus. We can do it again. We can do it now. The biggest shortage is of political muscle and willpower.