Tis the season to be worried 

It’s that time of year again. The John Lewis advert is out, selection boxes are on the shelves in Tesco, and the NHS is heading for its annual winter crisis. By all accounts we are in for a bumper one this year – the worst crisis ever. So at least that’s something to look forward to. According to The Guardian, NHS staff are ‘petrified’ of what will happen in the NHS this winter. Some of them are so petrified they are going to stand still outside hospital gates in nurses’ uniforms to emphasise the point, they are going on strike.

The NHS has well over a hundred billion pounds at its disposal annually. The shape of any graph representing NHS spending in recent years looks like the north face of the Eiger. Money was hosed at it during the sniffles pandemic (£37 billion for test and trace alone) and still, at the slightest mention of a winter crisis, it does its best Oliver Twist impression and begs for more (£10 million this year for winter mental health services for instance). And yet, the service just gets worse.

Some whining NHS panjandrum was on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this week bleating about how her staff had just been through two very stressful years of the pandemic and were facing burnout. I have never made a Tik Tok video, but I can imagine it is quite stressful. And the sheer stress of being interviewed on the telly in front of an empty Nightingale ward, wondering when you are going to be called out by a switched-on member of the viewing public must have been excruciating. Alas, the peasants simply would not oblige and die in the numbers predicted by Neil ‘Mystic Meg’ Ferguson of Imperial College, damn them. The Nightingale hospitals were never used, and many casualty departments stood empty. What, I ask, is burning these nurses out?

I have no idea how much money it takes to run the NHS effectively but, based on a lifetime of watching the budget increase and services decline, I know the answer to that question is not ‘more’. To use an analogy that is relevant to the NHS, if a patient is bleeding to death, then it is imperative to administer blood in sufficient quantities to keep the person alive. But, while that is happening, someone must also locate the source of the bleed and stop it. The NHS is being constantly infused with funding but, despite promises to the contrary, nothing ever happens to stem the problem.

It is an easy shot to point at some of the high salaries in the NHS but in 2015 there were over 50 thousand people being paid salaries higher than £100,000 and we have recently hired another 400 bureaucrats who are being paid over £100,000. The Chief Executive is paid a quarter of a million. By the living standards of most people these are eye-watering salaries, but the question is not how much they are paid but what exactly are they doing?

Then there is the brigade of inclusion and diversity officers, 800 of them earning £47,000 a year and since, wherever two or three inclusion and diversity officers gather together in the name of gender equality there needs to be a senior inclusion and diversity officer, these come in very reasonably at £70,000 annually. During my time in the NHS—mercifully short—we were always shouting for an inclusion and diversity officer to attend the gory scene of a misgendering or help resuscitate yet another casualty of white privilege.

I have no idea how many years I have left to wander on God’s earth, it may be in single figures, or it may be another couple of decades. However long it is I know that as I draw my last breath someone somewhere will be speaking in a serious tone about the forthcoming winter crisis in the NHS.

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.