Express & Star comment: Getting to grips with the NHS
For 70 years the National Health Service has been a source of enormous pride for this country. It has provided free healthcare to generations of Britons and has been held up as a shining example to the rest of the world.
What would its founders think of its current, parlous state?
The Health Secretary has had to admit that up to 270 women may have died earlier than they should have done because of administrative incompetence.
They were not invited to a final routine screening for breast cancer, something that should happen as a matter of course for all women in England between the ages of 50 and 70. The error is thought to have affected 450,000 women.
It is a scarcely believable scandal and yet comes after years of similar tales of bureaucratic foul-ups, medical errors and downright lack of care.
Meanwhile more than 36,000 patients had to wait more than four hours to be seen at A&E departments run by Sandwell’s NHS Trust over the past 12 months.
Around 3,000 patients every month were kept waiting as Sandwell General and Birmingham’s City Hospital struggled to cope.
Sandwell’s NHS Trust has failed to meet national waiting time targets for more than two years.
The trust’s chief executive, Toby Lewis, has described the delays as ‘unacceptable’. That’s putting it mildly.
Mr Lewis is not having a great time at the moment, having also had to admit that the problem-plagued Midland Metropolitan Hospital, which was originally due to open this year, may not be ready until 2022. Four years late.
And, to cap it all at a time when there is a constant call for more money for the NHS, it is revealed that a locum doctor brought in for a week’s cover at Dudley’s Russells Hall Hospital was paid £195 an hour. If that doctor worked five eight-hour shifts he would have been paid £6,900. For a week’s work.
This is the same hospital where it was revealed last year a consultant was paid £3,608 for a single shift.
At what point is someone going to finally get a grip on our NHS and this toxic cocktail of overspending and incompetence?
If hard questions need to be asked about how we continue to pay for our health service, then let them be faced.
But this continual lurch from crisis to crisis and from one disaster to another must cease, for all our sakes.
