Matt Hancock, help me and my colleagues save the NHS before it's too late

We demand the health secretary engages in urgent dialogue with NHS staff, and generates meaningful solutions to the desperate situation in which we now find ourselves

Despite the government’s best efforts to suggest otherwise, this January has been one of the worst months in the history of the NHS. A few weeks ago, it was revealed that Accident and Emergency waiting times are now the worst on record, with one in five patients waiting more than four hours, and the number of 12-hour waits at an all-time high.

What did we get from our prime minister and health secretary in our hour of need? A statement from Downing Street saying winter is “always challenging” and an announcement from Matt Hancock that he intends to scrap the 4-hour A&E target, a move that the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has warned will have “a near-catastrophic impact on patient safety’’.

These audacious responses represent a crisis in leadership, one that has left over 600 NHS workers like me with no choice but to voice our discontent in an open letter to Mr Hancock. We are demanding he engages in urgent dialogue with NHS staff, and generates meaningful solutions to the desperate situation in which we now find ourselves.

Any effort to begin restoring trust with NHS staff and getting the health service back on track must start with taking responsibility. A decade of Conservative cuts has played a pivotal role in driving the NHS to breaking point. There’s a sadistic brilliance in their strategy. A crisis doesn’t have to happen overnight. Rather, spend 10 years presiding over the collapse of the social care system, spiraling GP waiting times and countless closures of local services and you can guarantee that, bit by bit, people will learn to accept the status quo. The treatment of 92-year-old RAF veteran Stan Solomons, who earlier this month was left waiting on a trolley at Leicester Royal Infirmary A&E for over 12 hours – a case that few people know about, fewer still care about – reflects the worrying indifference this government has developed towards our elderly.

As well as taking responsibility for past failings, we demand that this government commits to transparency when it comes to the future of our NHS. The Conservative election campaign was jam-packed with promises: 40 new hospitals, 50,000 more nurses, 6,000 more GPs and “record investment in our NHS”. As it stands, these pledges are either unrealistic, misleading or untrue.

Take the commitment to build 40 new hospitals. In reality, 34 have simply been given small amounts of money to develop “plans” for future work, with no funding identified to implement them. What about “record investment”? The failure to account for inflation is deliberately misleading (you’ll notice there has been a clear diktat from on high that Conservative MPs reword this in media appearances to “the biggest cash boost”). Yet regardless of the Conservatives’ truthfulness about their promised funding, expert health think tanks have made it clear that the level of funding promised will be insufficient to address future issues the service will face.

NHS staff do not appreciate attempts to mislead us or the public – and we running out of patience. We did not write this letter for the sake of it. We wrote it for our patients, whose welfare is being treated with contempt by this government. The ball is in Matt Hancock’s court. We want to engage in a meaningful and productive dialogue – I hope he does, too.

Tom Gardiner is a doctor working in London, a member of Keep Our NHS Public and sits on the executive committee of the Fabian Society.