CONFRONTED with the appalling crisis in NHS hospitals’ A&E emergency services, the Labour government plans to restrict access to emergency departments, to save money by the dismantling of the NHS hospital system, it announced on Thursday.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who infamously declared the NHS a ‘broken system’ upon Labour’s election last year, now plans to destroy the A&E units, after the loss of thousands of beds and thousands of medical staff jobs over the past decade, and step up his campaign to totally close and privatise the NHS.
Labour’s assault on the NHS will instead divert ‘walking wounded’ patients to just 40 same-day care and emergency treatment centres. They will be told to stay away from A&E units. The centres will be sited next to existing A&E units, but with no hospital beds available.
Wes Streeting denigrated the NHS workers and their services by stating that a raft of changes would bring the health service ‘out of the dark ages’, after a decade of government cuts created ‘catastrophically’ long A&E trolley waits. In fact it is the beginning of the end for the NHS!
Yesterday, health officials created a network of around 40 same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres next to small A&E departments to deal with all but the most serious cases to avoid ‘unnecessary’ hospital admissions.
Health chiefs said the measures, which would cost £450 million, would ‘resuscitate’ the NHS and would mean 800,000 fewer patients each year waiting more than four hours at A&E.
He said far too many people were ending up in A&E for want of GP appointments, comparing the average £400 cost of an A&E visit with the £40 cost of a GP slot.
The plan will also include the rollout of up to 15 mental health crisis assessment centres, to divert such patients away from casualty units to specialist support.
In addition, 500 new ambulances will be promised.
Ambulance paramedics, not doctors, are to assess the patients ‘on the spot’ using laptops.
Streeting said: ‘Many patients who end up in A&E don’t need to be there and could get better treatment elsewhere.’
The Health Secretary said too many patients had ended up stuck on trolleys or facing ‘unacceptably long waiting times’ for ambulances, for want of care elsewhere.
He said: ‘Because patients can’t get a GP appointment, which costs the NHS £40, they end up in A&E, which costs around £400; worse for patients and more expensive for the taxpayer.’
Around 1.7 million attendances at A&E every year currently exceed this time frame.
The plan aims to drive up A&E performance to 78 per cent, up from 75 per cent this year, promising ‘over 800,000 people a month will receive more timely care’.
Rachel Power, chief executive of the Patients Association, said the investment was welcome, but said the plans risked ‘missing the point’. This was that so many people end up at A&E units because they could not get a GP appointment.
She said: ‘This plan addresses the symptoms of a struggling system without tackling the root causes. It accepts that people are turning to A&E because they can’t get GP appointments, but without imminently expanding access to timely support closer to home, there’s a real risk of simply shifting the pressure elsewhere in the system.’
Dr Katie Bramall, BMA GP committee England chair, said: ‘There is a huge missed opportunity where this announcement mentions patients’ challenges in accessing GP services, but offers no proposals and zero funding to increase GP capacity at all.
‘With practices in England providing 50 million patient contacts each and every month, we cannot work any harder – the government must create greater capacity to better meet patients’ needs. This requires investment to drastically expand GP surgeries to house more GPs providing more appointments.
RCN General Secretary, Professor Nicola Ranger said: ‘Those in government must recognise that their plans will also require investment in the nursing staff to deliver them. Failure to act will simply be adding even greater pressures to a profession that is already on the brink, and the plans will fail before they have even begun.’
The reality is: To defeat this onslaught on the very existence of the NHS in order to pay off the government’s unrepayable public debt burden, workers must mobilise in their millions and force their trade union leaders and the TUC to call a general strike to smash this reactionary crusade by PM Starmer’s Labour government and bring it down.
The intense death agony of capitalism can only be defeated by a socialist revolution to put an end the this barbaric race to the bottom with the seizing of power by the working class. Build the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists to provide the leadership to organise this. This is the only way forward.
