Fund the NHS, not corporate profiteers

The following letter was submitted to the Leicester Mercury by SONHSL supporter Jean Burbridge.

Our Health Minister Wes Streeting said recently he was ashamed and depressed at the plight of several A& E departments forced to call ‘critical incidents’. (These are where A& E departments are overwhelmed by patients and have to abandon ‘targets’ and call on other hospitals for assistance.)

I doubt he was as distressed as the A&E doctor of over 9 year’s experience who sat and cried in the car park at the end of his 12 hour shift at New Year. He wrote of working in a unit built to deal with 50 patients and it had 180; supposed to run with 12 staff minimum but functioning with only 8.

But what is Wes Streeting’s latest plan? It is to give £2.6 billion to the profit making private sector to start to reduce waiting lists for Elective treatment. (Elective care covers a broad range of planned, non-emergency services, from diagnostic tests and scans to outpatient appointments, surgery and cancer treatment.) There is little profit to be made out of A & E.

This is continuing the tactic tried by the last government in 2022 which has already failed.

Every pound of public money should go into the public NHS . One of the many gaps in the latter is staff, and it is impossible for the private sector to run without using some of the same staff as work in the NHS.

The logical route is to expand the NHS itself – which provides the overwhelming majority of elective as well as emergency and diagnostic services.

From primary care to secondary care, prioritise staff recruitment, retain staff with decent pay and conditions and invest capital into repairing the crumbling building stock.