The NHS is not working

Our national health service, coincidentally known as the National Health Service (NHS), continues to disintegrate into chaos and, in some places, paralysis. Fêted for decades as the jewel in the crown of our welfare state, it has fallen for its own rhetoric and thinks that it only needs to exist to merit praise. When troubles beset it, it points to external forces, blames underfunding and inevitably holds out its bottomless begging bowl in expectation of another health directed handout. But it continues to deteriorate in terms of the service it delivers.

Its only answer, it seems, is increasingly to address the progressive ‘woke’ agenda in the hope of not offending a minority of megaphoned moaners, while ignoring the majority of people who simply want to know that when they are sick, they can see a doctor. More to the point, should they become suddenly and acutely become ill at home or collapse in the street, they will be transported swiftly to an emergency department and have, at least, a fighting chance of returning home to their families.

Instead, the scenes outside many hospitals are reminiscent of the D-Day landings with emergency departments besieged, not by landing craft, but by ambulances. Inside these hospitals, things are not much better; I have worked in a military hospital in a war zone and there were fewer casualties waiting in corridors and sleeping on trollies. Hospitals are packed, the NHS claim, with people who have nowhere to go. This seems strange given that they must have come from somewhere. Apparently, back to the theme of external forces, there is insufficient social care for these people to be discharged safely. Thus, one part of our crumbling welfare state depends on another arm of the same crumbling welfare state and, no matter how much money is printed and subsequently thrown at it, nothing improves.

This seems odd given the efficiency with which those white elephantine Nightingale Hospitals were built during the purported Covid-19 emergency. They were never used, except as a backdrop to a series of embarrassing and infuriating Tik-Tok videos whereby NHS staff cocked a snook at the British public who were otherwise exhorted to undergo all manner of unnecessary and ineffective privations and to ritually humiliate themselves by banging saucepans, all under the rubric of ‘saving the NHS’. Doctors and nurses, especially the latter, milked the praise and adoration of the British public and got behind any manner of meaningless slogans issued at the Downing Street briefings while a great many of them never encountered a Covid-19 patient. Moreover, they sat in empty wards issuing virtue signals and lapping up the adoration, while the NHS was closed to people who were genuinely ill or who needed screening to prevent them becoming ill for the best part of two years.

In some parts of the country and regarding certain services it still seems like it is closed. Many general practitioners, having discovered the joys of misdiagnosing illness from the comfort of their own kitchens are now trying to make a virtue out of this nastiness by ‘offering’ their patients video consultations, as if this was some great leap forward in community medical practice. Our densely populated and small country is being offered a service that would make the Flying Doctors in Alice Springs blush with embarrassment.

Yet another review of the NHS, with particular emphasis on its management, has taken place, but nothing will change. The captains of this great industry will continue to conduct the orchestra as the ship sinks and, instead of plugging the holes, they will build more cabins on top in the form of equality and diversity managers; issuing badges with pronouns on them, declaring yet another day to celebrate, yet another addition to the alphabet soup of sexual identities and insisting on referring to proud young mums as ‘people who give birth’. If we are lucky, another expensive review will be commissioned and the whole service reorganised into whatever shape it was last time before it was reorganised.

The NHS displays the worst aspects of Stalinist democratic centralism combined with the worst aspects of autonomous mini dictatorships. In its Stalinist guise, it continues to absorb vast amounts of our hard-earned taxes and exists to serve the state rather than the people. On the other hand, some hospitals and health trusts are out of any kind of central control. Witness the way that many have wilfully ignored the government directive to discard face masks. Moreover, they have been withholding treatment to sick members of the public who refuse to comply, and continue to implement draconian and unnecessary restrictions on visitors, even to the sickest and most terminal of patients.

I do not have a solution to the problem that is the NHS, but it is clear that more of the same is not working and is not the answer. Expanding the service, diverting more funds towards it, employing more nurses, creating more management posts and exhorting the public to take more responsibility for their own health are all failing. One of the problems is the perpetual slogan about the NHS being ‘free at the point of delivery’ which most people hear simply as ‘free’. It is not free and, therefore, it cannot be free at the point of delivery. The slogan is meaningless. But it does mean that the state purports to take care of your health while you get on with the rest of your life.

However, under the impression that it is free, the service has been abused, especially through the misuse of emergency services for trivialities and unnecessary visits to general practitioners. Provided most people do not see the cost or feel the cost and have no choice about how to spend their money on health, this situation will not change. There is a reason that the NHS is not the best health service in the world and way down the league table of health services in developed countries. There is also a reason why it has never been replicated by any other country: it simply does not work.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.