Saturday Long Read: The NHS is Collapsing and Labour is Running out of Excuses

Saturday Long Read: The NHS is Collapsing and Labour is Running out of Excuses A system shaved to the bone, a winter crisis already unfolding, and a government furious because the arithmetic no longer works. Fair Warning - this is a long read. Do feel free to pop the kettle on, make a coffee (or tea, if you must) and settle in. It is angry in places, but I promise, it does eventually go somewhere. The NHS finds itself at an inflection point this week. And I don’t mean an inflection point in the way that a DHSC minister does - that sort of cheerful, PowerPointy “inflection point” where there is an overly earnest admission that everything is immensely hard, absolutely, but optimism and derring-do is mandatory 1 . No, I mean the real kind most closely related to the meaning of those two words. The kind of inflection point where a system that has been, for years, shaved down so aggressively financially, operationally, clinically and politically, that it now has the potential to completely fail. That this system, which has no fat left to burn, no slack, no buffer, no “we’ll just flex a bit more” is standing staring wide-eyed at a crisis knowing that this has the potential to cause it to not bend (yet again), but to snap. We are, as a country, watching a major crisis unfold in real time. Hospitalisations have surged by more than 50% in one week on the back of an early and mutated flu outbreak, with an average of 2,660 patients per day in wards admitted on the back of this. NHSE has described this level of flu, which is the highest that’s ever been recorded for this time of the year it as the “worst case scenario” for December. And while we’re being overwhelmed with flu cases, there is a not-unexpected Resident Doctor’s Strike precariously looming in the near horizon, which the Labour government has met with defensiveness. Lecturing. Moral theatre. They’ve met this with a full-fat serving of “how very dare you!” - and that tells me one very specific thing. This government knows that it is completely out of room to manoeuvre. I will say upfront that I am writing this piece in the context of my own resignation from the health service this week. After nearly a year of wrangling with it, this Wednesday I finally sent the resignation letter that was lurking in my drafts folder. I didn’t do so because I was bored, “in need of a change” or because I just didn’t enjoy my work anymore. I resigned because the pressures and the compromises and the obfuscation has become unbearable - and because I finally reached that point where either I stop being honest with myself, or I stop pretending that I would be able to do a job expected of me while not being given the tools with which to do so. This is in no way a noble martyrdom speech, just an...

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