The NHS desperately needs cash or it won’t survive, says former GP and Tory Health Minister Dan Poulter
If we don't plough money into our health service the winter crisis will become a permanent crisis
The NHS is under massive pressure.
States of emergency have been declared in hospitals up and down the country.
Record numbers of sick and vulnerable patients are waiting for over 12 hours for potentially life-saving treatment in A&E.
Hard working staff do their best, but there are simply not enough of them to treat an ever increasing number of patients.
As a doctor, who has worked in the NHS for over 10 years, I have never seen it this bad.
The winter crisis in A&aE has been caused by several factors that have built up over time.
Cuts to local council social care budgets have left frail older people struggling to get the care and support they need at home.
An increasing lack of GPs in some parts of the country, and the small size of some GP practices means that appointments are not always available in the evenings or at weekends.
So with nowhere else to go, people are forced to turn up at A&E and it is sometimes difficult to discharge patients back home due to a lack of resources to care for them in the community.
The simple truth is that NHS desperately needs more money, or else it simply won’t be able to cope, GP surgeries won’t be able to open longer hours, and more patients will suffer.
Every year, the health service in England gets about £120 billion from the Government, which is a huge amount of money.
But when the NHS employs 1.2 million staff, and treats tens of thousands of people every single day, that money is very quickly used up on caring for patients, performing operations, and buying medicines.
But like every big organisation, there is waste in the NHS.
The Government has already reduced back office costs, and as a result is putting around £1.5 billion every year back into frontline patient care.
And our health service can do more to save money and help staff to use their time more effectively.
We know from reviews of hospital contracts, that there are still too many hospitals being ripped off by big suppliers, and big drug companies.
For example, one hospital may be paying twice as much for items like medical gloves or syringes than another hospital just down the road.
This is costing the NHS millions of pounds that should instead be being spent on frontline patient care.
Computer and IT systems in many hospitals are out of date.
Computers in A&E often cannot share patient information with local GPs or local nursing homes.
Poor IT wastes the time of many staff, and means that health professionals can lack the essential information they need to treat patients, particularly in emergency situations.
This badly needs to change.
Many NHS staff feel that they are drowning under NHS red tape, spending too much time filling out forms.
GPs in particular spend a lot of time every day doing paper work.
This means they have to close their surgery doors, rather than see patients.
A radical reduction in unnecessary NHS bureaucracy is required to free up more staff time to care for patients.
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Sickness, holidays and maternity leave require temporary staffing cover, but there are too many hospitals which don’t have enough doctors or nurses to fill day to day staffing rotas and meet the needs of patients.
This is particularly true in A&E, general practice and mental health.
As a result, around £3 billion is spent every year on expensive temporary and agency staff contracts.
Employing more permanent staff would actually save the NHS millions, and would mean less money filling the bank accounts of temporary staffing agencies, with the savings being put back into caring for patients.
After a bruising argument with the Government over the junior doctor contract, compounded by cuts to nurses training bursaries, and after 7 years with almost no increase in pay, morale amongst NHS staff is low.
The situation is not helped when some senior healthcare managers enjoy much larger yearly pay increases than other staff and when some senior managers are paid salaries way in excess of £200,000.
But reigning in the pay of senior managers, getting better deals from hospital suppliers and drug companies, improving NHS IT systems, as well as training and employing more permanent staff takes time.
The NHS desperately needs extra money today. Without that extra Government cash, the current NHS winter crisis will become a permanent crisis.