Senior NHS doctors declared a state of national emergency in the NHS yesterday as waiting lists soared, with thousands of patients being treated in hospital corridors and with doctors balloting for strike action over pay and lack of work-placements for newly-qualified medics.
This came just months after Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledge to increase NHS funding by a further £29 billion a year, and despite Labour’s plan to set up a £450m urgent and emergency care plan earlier this year, in an attempt to prevent another winter crisis.
NHS unions have condemned Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s plans to close and replace A&E departments with nearby clinics for ‘walking wounded’ patients, without any provision for back-up hospital beds or specialist medical staff if needed.
Patients are now facing longer waits despite the NHS budget for day-to-day spending rising from £188.5 billion in 2023-24 to more than £205 billion in 2024-25.
Professor Nicola Ranger, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, commented: ‘All signs are pointing to a corridor care disaster this winter, and ministers must now take urgent steps to keep patients safe.’ She warned that hospitals risk being overwhelmed this winter.
Dr Vicky Price, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said the ‘rise in 12-hour waits in emergency departments is a stark warning that urgent and emergency care across the UK is in a state of national emergency’.
‘Nearly 1,500 people every day – many of them frail and clinically vulnerable – are being left in overcrowded, unsafe environments for far too long,’ she added.
New figures have revealed that almost 45,000 patients admitted to hospital as an emergency last month received ‘corridor care’ while they waited for more than 12 hours on a trolley – 6,000 more than the same time last year, albeit there were more emergency admissions.
The NHS waiting list for pending treatments remains stubbornly high at 7.41 million after rising for the third month in a row.
There are just 140,000 fewer patients on an NHS waiting list – a total of 6.26 million – than there were when Labour took office in July 2024. Some patients are waiting for more than one appointment.
Next month, Reeves will be forced to address a fiscal ‘black hole’ of up to £50bn in the disastrous public finances, while Streeting is under additional pressure from junior doctors, first-year medics and GPs from the British Medical Association, as well as nurses and other healthcare staff who have threatened walkouts.
However, Streeting said in August that ministers had a ‘responsibility’ to stand up to demands for higher public sector pay and explain that the government ‘can’t do everything for everyone, everywhere, all at once’.
Recently both the IMF and the Bank of England warned that Britain must start charging for the NHS to ease mounting pressures from high public debt, rising borrowing costs and stagnant growth.
Meanwhile, PM Keir Starmer has kow-towed to US President Trump’s PS’s demands to allow the giant pharmaceutical companies to increase the prices of their medicinal drugs to the NHS by 25 per cent, costing the health service billions from its budget and denying treatment to millions of patients, the Nuffield Trust has warned. The drug companies had also threatened Labour to allow the price increases, or they would relocate to the US.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) General Secretary Nicola Ranger also warned this week that ‘the NHS and social care will cease to function’ without migrant staff in response to the government’s ‘arrogant’, ‘divisive and xenophobic’ plans to restrict foreign worker visas for health workers.
Now however, the OBR’s forecasts for economic growth have been accused of being an attempt at ‘cooking the books’ and are ‘catastrophically wrong’, as its pre-budget figures next month will reveal.
David Miles, a top economist at the OBR, admitted to politicians in a Treasury select committee meeting last year that ‘productivity is really difficult to forecast. Fifteen years ago, people thought that the level of GDP in the UK now would be 30 per cent higher than it is,’ he said.
It is clear Labour is sacrificing the every existence of the NHS to satisfy the demands of the bankers and financiers, and emergency urgent action is required by the working class to prevent it.
The deafening silence from the TUC is treacherous and workers must demand that the TUC calls an indefinite general strike to bring down this reactionary Labour government, to go forward to a Workers Government and socialism in Britain and beyond.
A socialist government will nationalise the banks, utilities and major industries, abolish the waiting lists and develop a fully funded and properly staffed National Health Service that will be free at the point of delivery.
Only revolutionary action by the working class will prevent the destruction of the NHS.
Join the Workers Revolutionary Party today to lead this struggle to abolish bankrupt capitalism and replace it with the World Socialist Republic!