The daily count of new Covid cases is averaging around 40,000. It has been above 25,000 since mid-July. Thanks to vaccinations, the death count is about one-tenth of the early-2021 peak, and the hospital-admission count about a quarter, but both are edging up even before winter sets in.
Years of budget-paring have set hospitals to operate with no leeway even in ordinary winters. The NHS has to deal with a big backlog. Flu rates are for now unusually low, and rates for the other common virus RSV modest, but they could well surge.
We need increased funding, including to increase NHS workers’ pay; decreased privatisation; and wider social measures to tackle Covid.
In the Guardian on 29 October, an NHS respiratory doctor wrote:
“Currently, we regularly see 50% more patients per day in A&E than the maximum it was ever designed for.
“There is often a wait to secure even a cubicle... for examination. Sometimes I have to send a colleague to fetch a patient while I wait in some inappropriate location — on one occasion an equipment store — just to reserve somewhere with sufficient privacy before someone else takes it.
“Ambulances queue outside the door with waits of hours just to unload their patient and get back on the road; a criminal waste of their time. On top of this... we are often functioning with staff ratios less than 50% of what they should be...
“There are precious few beds available... the optimum bed occupancy to be efficient is 85%… We usually run around 95% even in summer months, and often over 100% as patients discharged in the morning are replaced in the afternoon. Even a small increase in demand is therefore critical.
“We have had to declare several ‘internal incidents’ in the past two months due to the bed crisis. This happens when the situation becomes so bad that patient safety is directly threatened...”
The £6 billion extra funding Rishi Sunak has proposed is absurdly small. Before Covid, the NHS had been underfunded for years. If increases since 2010 had matched those after 1997, its budget would be £50 billion higher.
As well as a much bigger funding increase, the health service needs a privatisation decrease. More and more funding is siphoned into private profit through a host of mechanisms, a trend the Tories’ Health and Care Bill is set to strengthen.
Privatisation and outsourcing should be halted and reversed. Private hospitals should be requisitioned and integrated into the NHS.
The NHS is maybe 100,000 staff short, and its workers are stretched and worn. Support workers on rights and pay — and extra funding for the 15% or £3,000 increase health workers want! Help Unison activists with their “indicative ballot” for action on pay, running from 3-4 November to 2 December.
The Labour Party is still saying and proposing little about the situation in the NHS.
The health unions — which include the left-led Unite and Unison with its new left-wing national executive majority — should call a national demonstration for the NHS, with clear demands, and call on Labour to support it.
