And so it ends.... NHS consultants have voted to accept an improved pay offer (which is more generous than before to consultants of less than seven years seniority)....
No doubt, Victoria Atkins hopes this will draw support away from the continuing dispute with the Junior Doctors.
However, this still looks like fiddling while Rome burns as regards the more general malaise in the NHS
Again, this should not need to be reiterated, BUT...
This is NOT the fault of the #NHS or its wonderful staff.
it is ENTIRELY the fault of the #Conservative government who are trying to run it into the ground so that YOU get mad with the NHS and allow them to sell it off so you end up with a US-like healthcare system. You REALLY do not want that, believe me (from experience).
#Tories caught planning to sell their own grandmothers...
..wives, husbands, siblings, children, friends, in fact anyone dumb enough to join the Tory party. And they're already selling everyone's sensitive #NHS medical records to a dodgy US spy firm for peanuts.
Home from my first radiotherapy session. Four more to go, I should be all done by Tuesday next week. I love our #NHS 😍
A lady, I only met today, got to ring the bell and say an emotional goodbye to the staff, as she completed her course of 36 radiotherapy treatments. 🙂
So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the #NHS, is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.
NHS A&E waiting lists costs lives.... the Tories have been unwilling to really act to reduce waiting times for emergency treatment (through the continued process of defunding)... and so one must conclude Tory NHS policies are clearly killing people.
Of course this is not news, but perhaps a little more starkly obvious when the link between waiting lists, unnecessary fatalities & funding cuts is put simply?
Baseless article by Kate Andrews argues that 'Britain is falling out of love with the NHS.' In reality, the public strongly backs the NHS and its core values.
You'll be less than shocked to discover that research indicates support for striking nurses & doctors in the NHS is more likely among 'nonconservative voters, individuals leaning towards left-wing politics & those with greater trust in the NHS'!
Its likely that the Tories have calculated playing hardball on the strikes would (does) play well (better) with their supporters & is politically a low risk strategy.
@sjwrenlewis concludes, rightly, that while voters might forgive (or forget, provided the press lets them) that a Labour Govt broke its promise not to raise taxes, few will be so forgiving if it has not made significant repairs to the social damage (from the NHS to the UK's infrastructure) wrought by 14 years of Tory rule.
Things will not be easy for Labour if they win the election but there's no need to tie their hands behind their back
GP practices shouldn't have to contract separately for providing services to the NHS, separate negotiations, separate terms and conditions, separate and additional costs on both sides.
All of the GP practices should be nationalised and brought into the NHS in all four countries, governance should be local, very local.
Great news for NHS privatisers this morning. The Tories' policy is working.
"That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital"
Noam Chomsky
Perhaps unsurprisingly, satisfaction with the NHS as measured in the British Social Attitudes survey has sunk further in 2023, with now 24% satisfied (down from 29% in 2022 & from over 50% in 2020).
Strikes, Covid & the ongoing crisis are all likely causes... but behind that lies the Tory's wrecking of the health service.
Nearly half of those surveyed thought taxes should be raised to tackle the funding shortage across the NHS (implicitly recognising its a funding issue).
The problem for a workforce plan for the NHS that includes a high dependency on incoming foreign staff, is that having once migrated for work, they will have little compunction about doing so again... having gained (valuable) experience in the NHS, but also have experienced the actuality of the NHS crisis, they often move on.
Unsurprisingly they are heading to countries were staff (nurses) are paid up to double what UK pays!
Labour could axe all hereditary peers from House of Lords, reports suggest (www.standard.co.uk)
Labour plans to axe all hereditary peers from the House of Lords, reports have suggested....