The United Kingdom’s cradle-to-grave “free” National Healthcare System (NHS) is in deep crisis, with not enough doctors and nurses, long waits for ambulances, patients sprawled on the floors at the ER, and emergency consultation appointments being booked a year out. And it is estimated that hundreds of people are dying each week because of delays in urgent care.
The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Adrian Boyle, shared that once figures showing the wait times for December are released, they will likely be the worst he has ever seen, as more than a dozen NHS trusts and ambulance services declared critical incidents during the holidays.
Experts are placing part of the blame of the NHS failure to provide adequate care to ailing patients on a huge flu outbreak that is driving up the nation’s death toll.
The Sun reported: “More people died between December 17 and 23 than any week since the third Covid lockdown in February 2021, according to official figures. A total of 14,530 Brits passed away, with only 429 linked to Covid. Non-Covid deaths were the highest since January 2018, with 14,101.”
“What we’re seeing now in terms of these long waits is being associated with increased mortality, and we think somewhere between 300 and 500 people are dying as a consequence of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care each week. We need to actually get a grip of this,” Boyle said in a Times Radio interview.
Noting the shocking number of lives lost and the growing criticism over the failing NHS, the U.K.’s new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, on Wednesday said “he had heard the people’s lament: that many were looking ahead to the new year ‘with apprehension,’ that they were ‘anxious’ when they saw ambulances waiting in line to get into hospitals, and frustrated and fearful to see surgery backlogs lasting for years.”
In his first major speech to the country, Sunak tried to reassure his nation that he has control of the situation and shared his vision for “a future that restores optimism, hope and pride in Britain.”
The Washington Post stated that “he promised NHS waiting lists would fall with the hiring of more nurses, doctors and care providers and an additional 7,000 beds added to the 100,000 now. All of which his government will somehow accomplish while not giving in to pay hike demands by striking nurses and ambulance crews.”
Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said Sunak’s speech suggested he is “detached from the reality” of what is happening inside the hospitals.
The NHS website is warning patients that these “strikes are taking place in some parts of the NHS on 11, 18, 19 and 23 January 2023” and that some departments “are likely to be extremely busy with longer waiting times than normal.”
After Sweden, Britain has the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in Europe. Bed occupancies in hospitals are said to be “at 94 percent, making it difficult to send recovering patients somewhere else — because, alongside the crisis at the NHS, there are also not enough staff to serve as home health aides and at nursing homes. The sector has 165,000 vacancies.”
NHS is also short 50,000 nurses, reported the Post, and “half of all new hires today come from overseas, because the system either can’t train enough people domestically or pays too little to attract new workers from within the United Kingdom. At the same time, Brexit has limited the ability of nurses to come to Britain from the European Union.”
The NHS program that was birthed in 1948 is a fine example of why government-provided one-size-fits-all healthcare is no panacea, as many Britons are now seeking services from private providers. A new report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shared that “around one in eight (13%) adults reported they had paid for private medical care, with 5% using private insurance and 7% paying for the treatment themselves,”
The ONS report surveyed 2,510 adults across the UK and found that one in five were waiting for an appointment, test, or treatment at an NHS hospital. Of those in that situation:
- Three-quarters said their delay had had either a strongly (34%) or slightly (42%) negative impact on their life
- 36% said waiting had made their condition worse
- 59% said it had damaged their wellbeing
- A third said long waits had affected either their mobility (33%) or ability to exercise (34%)
The Guardian reported:
Dr Tony O’Sullivan, co-chair of campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, claimed the numbers using a private healthcare provider were “a damning indictment of the devastating effect this government’s mismanagement has had on the NHS over the last 12 years….
“The NHS was objectively rated the best in the world in 2010. Now healthcare in the UK is rapidly becoming a genuine two-tier system due to the degradation of one of our finest assets, and ultimately we are all poorer for it.”
The UK’s disastrous NHS crisis should be a warning to every politician in the United States wanting to provide “free” healthcare to all in America. It will never work here. It will destroy Americans’ quality of life, reduce life expectancy, and cost trillions of dollars to support. The only way to provide the best healthcare in America is to get government completely out of the business and allow a competitive, private, free-market healthcare system to prevail.
