NHS Crisis (Autumn 2024). Another Installment of Medical Failure?

I have written a series of blogs on "the NHS Crisis", the first one in May 2011, some 13 years ago, and here is yet another update. However, this time it has been written for me - courtesy of an official Government Report, "Independent Investigation of the NHS in England, which does not write off the problem as a little local difficulty that will be solved by pouring more money into a failed institution!

The report was published after a 9-week review of the NHS by Lord Darzi, an independent peer, and former cancer surgeon, initiated by the election of a new Labour government in July 2024. It has been widely reported in the mainstream media, and paints a stark picture, far beyond the usual problems with long and growing waiting lists and delays in response, diagnosis and treatment throughout the entire NHS organisation. The report states that:

• Accident and Emergency services are in "an awful state":, with long waits estimated to be causing an additional 14,000 extra deaths (annually).
•  The health of the nation has deteriorated, and has brought in "a surge in long-term mental health conditions".
• Rising levels of illness risk economic prosperity, with 2.8 million people now unable to work because of poor health.
• Britain has higher cancer mortality rates than other countries.
• Although hospital staff have increased since the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of appointments and procedures have not risen because "patients no longer flow through hospitals as the should".
• The NHS has been starved of capital investment, leading to "crumbling buildings", mental health patients in "Victoria-era cells infested with vermin" and "parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins".
  

My series of blogs (use this link to see my last one, in March 2024, which gives links to all of them) have charted the rise and rise of the NHS Crisis as it has developed through the last 13 years, highlighting (i) the nature of the crisis at the time of writing, (ii) predicting that the crisis would get progressively worse, and would NOT be resolved by pouring more money into it, and (iii) that no-one has yet had the wit to work out the underlying reason for this ongoing NHS Crisis! 

Does the Darzi report, and the new government's initial response, address the issues I have raised? That's look at each one.

(i) Hitherto, the serious nature of the NHS Crisis has always been heavily discounted. It could be resolved by another management re-organisation, or (more usually) by putting in additional resources, by bringing in private investment: the problem was primarily one of under-investment. Now, we are told, the crisis will take 10 years to resolve, and no further money will be spent "without reform".

(ii) So the Darzi report has (at last) overturned the idea that the interminable saga of NHS Crises can be resolved by pouring more money into it. And for the first time in the 76 year history of the NHS, a British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, have openly admitted this. So my prediction has come true.

• Keir Starmer has said that although the NHS is in a critical condition, there will be no additional money "without reform". It must, he says, "reform or die". But what reform? Another structural management reform? There have been plenty of these, and none of them have prevented the NHS crisis spiralling, year by year.
  
• Wes Streeting has spoken about the three 'big shifts' that were needed. (a) a move from hospital to community care. (b) a move from analogue to digital technology "to empower patients and give them control over their healthcare". (c) moving from a treatment model to a preventative model. These are 'shifts' that have little or nothing to do with what I argue, that it is the treatment that the NHS offers its patients that is at the root of the problem.
  

 (iii) So the fundamental reason for the ongoing NHS Crisis has still not been identified! Why, for instance, are "patients no longer flowing through hospitals as the should"? Is the medical treatment they receive not working? The question is not even asked. And why is there "a surge in long-term mental health conditions". What is causing this surge? Again, the question is not asked, leave alone given a response. So how will these proposals get 2.8 million patients back to work - if there is to be no change to the medical treatment they receive? The misguided and thoughtless assumption that pharmaceutical medicine is treating illness and disease successfully remains firmly in place!

So what, indeed, is causing the unprecedented/epidemic levels of chronic diseases, like ADHD, Allergy, Arthritis, Autism, Dementia, Diabetes, Epilepsy, Heart/Lung/Kidney/Liver disease, Mental Health, and so many more? It has little to do with hospital care or community care, with digital technology, and moving to a 'preventative' model. In pharmaceutical medicine, prevention seems to mean giving drugs like Statins, and vaccines, earlier - whilst people are still well!

If the NHS continues to provide patients with a diet o pharmaceutical drugs, which have limited and marginal effectiveness as treatment, there is little hope that it will ever be able to reduce the number of sick patients, and the amount of sickness they present.

If the NHS continues to provide patients with pharmaceutical drugs which cause serious adverse reactions, and disease in patients, there is every possibility that the number of sick people, and the seriousness of their health deficits, will continue to increase - as they have done for the last 76 years.

So the Darzi report, and the government response to it, is positive in the limited sense that the seriousness of the problem has at last been recognised, and the futility of throwing more money in the bottomless pit of the NHS acknowledged. 

But without identifying the fundamental problem, the control that the NHS has gratuitously given to pharmaceutical medicine, and its almost total reliance on pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, the solution has again been missed again.

When the NHS was established it was based on two important principles. First, that treatment should be free at the point of use. And second, that the best medical treatment should be offered to patients. I agree with both these principles, but the second has been badly neglected. 

What was not envisaged in 1948 was that the pharmaceutical industry would achieve a virtual monopoly in the treatment options offered to patients by the NHS. The only change that has taken place regarding patient treatment has been the removal of Natural Medical Therapies, including homeopathy.

Pharmaceutical drugs are not making us better. Indeed they are making us sicker. But they now have a monopoly within the NHS. Visit a doctor, go to a hospital, and you will almost inevitably receive pharmaceutical medicine. 

That is the fundamental basis of the NHS crisis.

The NHS Crisis (Spring 2024): now there is no more money!

The NHS Crisis is developing fast, getting worse by the day, and has become a year-long event. I have been writing about this crisis for over 11 years now. The underlying pattern of the crisis has never changed:

 >>> increased sickness >>> followed by increased spending on pharmaceutical treatment >>> followed by even more sickness >>> and then even more demands for even more money. 

During this time the NHS has never changed its explanation for the crisis. They don't have enough money, they need more, lots more, for more pharmaceutical drug treatment, for more adverse drug reactions, for more sickness - for which the NHS will want more money for treatment. It is a merri-go-round!

It has always been thus. It is contained within the 14+ blogs written over the last 13 years on the NHS Crisis, all listed and linked at the foot of the page.

And no one (outside this blog) has EVER questioned whether it is wise to spend more and more money on a medical system that is so demonstrably failing to provide an effective response to the constantly expanding levels of sickness. Yet the right questions are beginning to be asked. The NHS has routinely told us that it does not have enough doctors and nurses. Yet doctor numbers have risen by 37%, and other staff by 45%, in the last 10 years. This Expose article asks "How does the the NHS do so little with so much". It fails to come to the inevitable conclusion, but it does provide some useful statistics from the Office for National Statistics.

• The number of doctors increased by 37,467 (up 37%) from 101,137 in 2013 to 138,604 by 2023.
• The number of nurses and midwives increased by 68,063 (up 23%) from 295,163 in 2013 to 363,226 in 2023.
• The number of scientific staff increased by 42,938 (up 13%) from 123,912 in 2013 to 166,850 in 2023.
• The number of support staff increased by 125,510 (up 45%) from 279,579 in 2013 to 405,089 in 2023.
• The number of infrastructure staff increased by 62,758 (up 41%) from 152,437 in 2013 to 215,195 in 2023.
• The number of ambulance staff increased by just 1,721 (up 10%) from 17,537 in 2013 to 19,258 in 2023.

Even the BBC is beginning to ask questions about the viability of the NHS. In July 2023 it wished the NHS a happy 75th birthday - but asked whether it could survive to 100 years old. They are right to ask the question, but as usual, wrong in their assessment of what the problem is. They mentioned the "dire warnings" that it could not do so "without drastic change". A change in the medical system, dominated by pharmaceutical drugs, that dominates NHS treatment? No, let's blame the patient instead!

            "When the NHS was created the main focus was on short bouts of treatment for injury and infection, but now the challenge is completely different.The ageing population means huge numbers of people are living with chronic health problems, such as heart disease, dementia and diabetes that require long-term care and for which there is no cure. It is already estimated about £7 out of every £10 spent in the NHS goes on people with these conditions. On average, those over 65 have at least two. And the situation is only going to worsen. "The numbers are going to grow," Health Foundation director of research and economics Anita Charlesworth says. "The baby boomer generation is reaching old age."

Predictably the BBC fails to spot that heart disease, dementia and diabetes have grown to epidemic proportions during the 75 years of NHS treatment, but fails to take the comment "... for which there is no cure" any further!

It does, however, provide graphs about health spending as a percentage of day-to-day public service spending, indicating that this rose from 27% in 1999-2000, to 32% in 2009-2020, to 42% in 2019-2020, and to 44% in 2024 to 2025. More and more money for health clearly indicates that there is less and less money for any other public service - education, police, local government, defence. We are gradually, progressively, robbing Peter to pay Big Pharma!

This Medscape article outlines just how bad the situation has become, focusing on the situation in Northern Ireland.

            "Record-breaking waiting lists and emergency department times – the worst across the UK, healthcare staff at breaking point and leaving the region, GP practices closing due to financial issues, and a scheduled junior doctors' strike this week have seen the situation hit crisis point. The health service in Northern Ireland is now in “absolute meltdown” say clinicians working in the region, with even the Minister for Health acknowledging that the situation is “deplorable” and “unprecedented”."

            "Northern Ireland's Minister of Health, Robin Swann issued a stark warning of an "extremely difficult and worsening" financial position for health and social care ... (as usual) ... calling for increased resources and multi-annual budgeting".             "We have a system that is in very real trouble. Every part of it is in profound distress.... The risks of service breakdown are real and growing in a range of areas. I do not say this to frighten people but to help build a shared understanding. We continue to have expectations and demands of health and social care that we cannot currently meet, and on the current trajectory the situation is getting worse rather than better".

In other words, there is no more money, no more handouts for a failing medical system can be expected. The Westminster Government continues to trickle money into the NHS; but it recognises that taxes are too high, that more borrowing is untenable, and in a recent budget, has said that they are expecting more productivity from medical staff (blame the staff?). The Opposition Labour party, which might find itself in government by the end of this year, tells a similar story; they will not break their fiscal rules, which effectively means - no more taxes, no more borrowing, no additional money for the NHS.

This is what has changed since I last wrote about the NHS Crisis. Both government and opposition has now accepted that there is no more money. The NHS is not going to be bailed out, again, as has happened routinely during the last 75 years. The magic "NHS money tree" is dead!

Another new factor is that key NHS staff have gone on strike; senior doctors, junior doctors, nurses, ambulance staff - people who have never been on strike before. Why? Despite the money thrown at the NHS little of it has apparently gone to staff. So not even those who deliver pharmaceutical medical treatment are content. A newly qualified doctor, after 5-6 years of training, has a starting salary is about £33,000. And it has been estimated that junior doctor's salaries have fallen by about 30% in the last 15 years.

So the NHS has not only devoted itself, entirely, to a system of medical treatment that does not work, which is actually making us sicker, it cannot even treat its clinicians, the people who operate the NHS, properly. Staff morale within the NHS is not only poor, it is getting worse.

In a health service that cannot cope with the pressures it faces, recent news from the GP Magazine, Pulse, on 12th March 2024, reported alarmingly that "swathes of GP's were at risk of redundancy". Watch this space! Is the NHS facing self-destruction? A BMA spokesperson has recently warned general practice that it has suddenly gone from a recruitment crisis to an employment crisis. 

Surely the NHS crisis cannot get any worse! But I haven't mentioned NHS dental services, which in many parts of the country are now virtually non-existent. The Guardian reported, in October 2023, that there were a record numbers of patients complaining to the NHS Ombudsman about poor care, exorbitant fees and gaining accept to NHS dental services in England. The Ombudsman said that poor dental care leaves patients frustrated, in pain and out of pocket. The number of complaints received every year has risen by 66%, and the proportion of complaints being upheld has increased from 42% to 78% over the same period. The ombudsman is currently receiving about 100 calls a week from people worried about poor treatment, an inability to access NHS dental care, and being removed from a dentist's practice list.

So the NHS crisis continues and deepens, as it is likely to do so long as we fail to recognise the main reason for the crisis. No problem is ever resolved unless and until the cause of the problem is accurately identified. The NHS, and the Government, have been singularly unable, or unwilling to do so to recognise that it has invested in pharmaceutical medicine, a medical system that just does not work. So, bad as the current crisis is, it will only get worse.

According to the USA Department of Health and Human Services, as many as 1 in 3 hospital admission each year are linked to adverse drug reactions, and inter-reactions. The situation in the UK is similar, as it is in other countries with a so-called 'advanced' or 'modern' medical system. So we have the evidence that prescription drugs, legitimately prescribed, cause patient harm, and make them sick, can even lead to death. 

In fact, many do lead to death. This is from a paper published by Imperial College London, "National State of Patient Safety, 2022. What we know about avoidable harm".

            "In 2019 there were more than 130,000 avoidable deaths in Great Britain - more than 22% of all deaths. Of these, 64% were classed as preventable and 36% were classed as treatable"

The problem is that the conventional medical establishment is skilled at discounting any such evidence. They are the result of under-performance, mistakes, errors, accidents, all of which can be avoided by improved management practices. The motto of the NHS seems to be "carry on, regardless".

 

NHS Crisis: links to previous blogs

• The NHS Debate (NHS in Crisis 2011)
• Our doctors in Crisis (NHS in Crisis 2015)
• Britain's NHS in Crisis (2016)
• NHS in Crisis (2016)
• NHS in Crisis (2017)
• NHS Crisis (Winter 2017)
  
• The NHS Crisis (2017-2018)
• NHS in Crisis (Summer 2018)
• NHS in Crisis (2018-2019)
• NHS Crisis (2019-2020). It gets worse each winter. But the real cause is never identified
• NHS in Crisis 2020. Another routine annual winter crisis notwithstanding Coronavirus Covid-19
• NHS in Crisis (Autumn 2020). Covud-19 is confirmation that conventional medicine is failing us
• The NHS Crisis (January 2021). The Covid-19 Pandemic, and an organisation heading for new levels of serious medical failure.
• The NHS in Crisis (March 2022)

 

 

The NHS in Crisis (March 2022)

The NHS is in deep crisis. Indeed it is a constant crisis that I have been writing about for over 10 years: and year by year the situation gets worse. So this has become a regular blog (links to previous pages are listed at the foot of this blog). So in future the topic will be updated in March every year - even though the subject will inevitably be the same - just worse each time!

The size of the crisis was demonstrated to me over the weekend by a petition sent to me via Change.org from an NHS nurse asking for "an urgent injection of funds" for the NHS, which she described as being "at breaking point". This text supported the petition.

        "As an NHS nurse, I have seen first hand the effect the pandemic has had on our patients, staff, and service. The NHS was already underfunded, but now it is at breaking point. We need an urgent injection of funds to save our health service, and we need it now.

        We really feel the pressure of the 100,000 vacancies in the NHS, which means we are understaffed and often having to do the job of more than one person. The workload is impossible. Staff are leaving because they have had enough and there is little incentive to stay or join the NHS.

        The safety of our patients and conditions for staff have been getting worse even prior to the pandemic - and it has been happening for over 10 years. We’ve seen our pay eroded meanwhile our responsibilities and skills have only increased and lots of staff are struggling to make ends meet.

        We are paying for this crisis with our mental and physical health and in our pay packets and our patients are suffering all the time as a direct consequence.

        But my NHS colleagues and I are determined to save our health service. That’s why we’re joining together with the major health unions and over 40 organisations to call on this government to act, to improve the health service, and to safeguard it for future generations

Our demands are:

1. Approve emergency funding of £20 billion to save lives this winter.

2. Invest in a fully publicly owned NHS and guarantee free healthcare for future generations.

3. Pay staff properly: without fair pay, staffing shortages will cost lives.

Across the NHS we are united in saying ’SOS NHS’, and we need your support too. Will you sign my petition to help save the NHS?"

This succinctly encapsulates the problems faced by the NHS, the crisis in which it finds itself, once more; and the normal response to the crisis? Always another massive injection of resources to "save the NHS".

The fundamental reason for these ongoing, and deepening NHS crises is that conventional (or pharmaceutical) medicine is, as always, ignored. More of the same medicine will not save the NHS.

• The NHS will continue to fail to make us better, to reduce the pressure on NHS services.
• NHS treatment is actually making us sicker, year by year, through adverse drug and vaccine reactions (see my website on Iatrogenic Disease). I have written about conventional medical failure in detail in my E-Book, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine".
•  And any new injection of money into the NHS will be used to pay for yet more of a failed medical system.
  

So what has been happening within the NHS during the last year? Covid-19 has, of course, provided the NHS with a new (?) excuse for its underlying failure. The NHS has effectively become a Covid-19 service - to the detriment of all else! Throughout the two years of the pandemic the NHS has received significant amounts of new additional money (the Chancellor said from the beginning - "all it takes"). And everything the NHS has received has been spent on "chasing" this virus. 

Conventional medicine admitted from the beginning of the pandemic that it had no treatment. And the public health measures that have been imposed on us - social distancing, face masks, test and trace, and lockdown, have all been spectacularly costly failures. Then, the new vaccines that have been rushed into our arms have proven to be both unimaginably unsuccessful (with more 'booster' injections being required on a regular basis), and the cause of significant patient harm. See this summary of UK data, taken from the UK government website.

So, for the past two years normal life has been put on hold, for the sick and vulnerable, and for fit and healthy people, with strong immune systems, alike. And now we are beginning to see how seriously detrimental these policies have been to all aspects of our social life, our mental health, to child development and education, to people's business's and livelihoods, to the national economy, and to lots more.

Yet the NHS obsession with Covid-19, which has not proven to be a significant event in relation to our health, has not altered what is happening within the NHS - it has just further exacerbated its decline into an ever-deepening crisis.

Increasing Levels of Illness and Disease.

For any country that spends ??% of its GDP on health, the bulk of this directly on the NHS, it is surely not too much to expect that it makes a difference to the lives and health of patients, and in particular, that it can be seen to tackle the scourge of illness and disease. The sole purpose of the NHS is to make us healthier. Yet it is very clearly not doing so!

Levels of sickness have been rising, often dramatically, for the past 75 years, for as long as the NHS has been in existence. Most chronic diseases are now running at unprecedented, epidemic levels, and they continue to rise. I have been writing about this for many years - this blog published in 2012. A more recent blog which chronicled the rising incidence, and the associated cost of chronic diseases such as ADHD, Allergy, Alzheimer's / Dementia, Arthritis, Asthma, Autism can be found here - CHRONIC DISEASE. The rise and rise of chronic diseases over the last 100 years; and the introduction of some new ones. There are many more 'out-of-control' chronic diseases detailed here. "Epidemics of Chronic Disease: why we are sicker now than we have ever been". 

The almost total focus of the NHS on the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that many patients have had to forego either early diagnosis, or treatment, or both, for these diseases. The NHS fixation on Covid-19, and the public health strategies used to deal with it, have exacerbated the situation. Perhaps the most serious consequence has been the ongoing rise of mental health. Even the BBC, an inveterate supporter of pharmaceutical medicine, has had to admit that the NHS is "struggling with a 'long tail' of pandemic mental health". 

       "The number of referrals for specialist NHS mental health care reached a record high in England by the end of 2021....

       "The Royal College of Psychiatrists says the pandemic has led to unprecedented demand and backlogs, and services are struggling to keep up.

       "There were 4.3 million referrals, for conditions such as anxiety and depression, in 2021.....

       "Just under a quarter - 1.025 million - were for children or adolescents" where there has been a  "huge rise in severe cases" with the previous two years each seeing about 3.8 million referrals.

       "The College had delivered 1.8 million mental health consultations in December 2021", but now "an estimated 1.4 million people were still waiting for treatment.

So not only is more money required for mental health services, many other similar situations exist throughout each NHS speciality. An ever-increasing amount of treatment is being delivered, but the treatment does not work, so there is never sufficient to cope with ever-increasing levels of patient demand.

And as usual, both the BBC article and the petition sets up the inevitable scapegoat. It's the government! They are not spending enough on health care - the NHS is under-resourced - it needs more (and more - and more) money. The result, if only politicians had to wit to see it, is what we can see happening before us. 

• Record numbers of patients waiting for all kinds of treatment, a demand that the NHS cannot cope with. 
• The waiting period for treatment continually increases, regardless of the condition, and regardless of how much additional spending on the NHS.

The Experience of Patients.

So record number of patients are now waiting for NHS treatment, now calculated to be over 6 million; and the amount of time patients are having to wait is increasing. Medscape has recently described this as a "disastrous NHS performance". The waiting list was 4.59 million in January 2020, so we have witnessed "an increase of just under 1.5 million, or almost a third, in a year". A trip to A&E now means that over 16,500 people (in England alone) have had to wait more than 12 hours for be seen (January 2022). Nearly 1 in 30 emergency admissions were delayed by 12 hours or more, and 60.8% were delayed by 4 hours or more. The article provides many similar figures that Medscape describe as "the worse performance since records began".

Worse is to come, apparently. A National Audit Office report has warned that even if the NHS manages to achieve its planned 30% increase in activity, the waiting list will still grow to over 7 million over the next three years. The Public Accounts Committee’s report described this as a ‘huge risk’ to primary GP care.

Many more patients are now queueing for what are described as 'Routine Operations", such a hip and knee replacement, cataract operations, and similar. The government have promised to eliminate all waits of more than a year by March 2025. The reality is that 24,000 people have been waiting for a least two years, nine time more then were waiting in April 2021.

Many patients, with a host of serious illnesses and diseases, are now waiting for treatment. The mainstream media have focused on cancer patients.

• the current 2-week target for urgent referrals for suspected cancer was already in decline, but is now considerably worse. One estimate shows only 75% of people referred toa specialist got an appointment within that time; the target is 93%. Many similar figures indicate that the NHS is continuing to fail.
  
• some targets are being lengthened to conceal the failure, for example, the 2-week wait for diagnosis is to be extended to 28-days.

Eve Byrne, director of advocacy at Macmillan Cancer Support, has said this about these latest figures. 

        "It is deeply troubling to see these figures now at yet another worst-ever record, as we know that any delay to diagnosis and treatment causes huge amounts of anxiety and distress for people living with cancer." 

It affected the availability of health services too. People were reluctant to go to hospital, or to see their doctor. They were scared by the way the NHS spoke about the pandemic, they were too afraid of living a normal life. Hospitals and doctors were protecting themselves, and did not encourage patients to attend.

So suddenly doctors were not available to those who wanted, or needed NHS treatment. There were problems obtaining a GP appointments. There were no face to face meetings. People who phone d for appointments found themselves stuck in long queues, getting through became a major issue. The cancellation of 'elective' surgery added to the frustration.Although not a new problem, NHS capacity to respond to patient need has been a problem for decades; but now it could all be blamed on Covid-19.

Doctor so doctor abuse became an issue, as patients became increasingly dissatisfied. This further lowered morale.

Distressing indeed. So what is the solution? The Health Secretary, Sajid Javid has announced there are to be more "radical NHS reforms"! For decades now there have always been two solutions to the problems of the NHS - more funding - and organisational reform. Neither ever works!

The Morale of Conventional Medical Staff

All this means that NHS staff are under increasing pressure, and this now seems to be a major cause of concern within the NHS. Read the wording of the petition again. There were 100,000 vacancies in the NHS prior to the pandemic. This situation did not arise because the NHS refused to employ staff; it happened because people with the right qualifications were not available. So it is unlikely that yet more money will be successful in finding more recruits, let alone prevent or replace those who are leaving, or are planning to leave, the NHS because of poor morale and unbearable work pressures.

Meg Hillier, MP, and chair of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, has said recently that she is extremely concerned that the Government has ‘no real plan’ to translate the increased funding of the NHS into improved patient outcomes. She did not add that this has been the case, increasingly, since 1948! She said that the Health Department still did not understand that the only solution to the problems of the NHS was to manage its greatest resource properly - "our heroic NHS staff" whom she describes as 

            "exhausted and demoralised, they’ve emerged from two hellish years only to face longer and longer lists of sicker people. And this is compounded by staffing shortages in a number of professional areas.’

Director of the Royal College of Nursing, Patricia Marquis, said that the Medscape figures "show the scale of the challenge nursing staff are facing in trying to reduce the backlog while all the other pressures they are under remain" adding that "nursing staff are struggling to provide safe and effective care with a severely-depleted workforce."

So the problem now is not just the effectiveness of NHS treatment, and its ability to get patients off the waiting list, it is the safety of patients.

The Kings Fund, an important 'think-tank' specialising in health, agreed, and stressed the seriousness of the sitution throughout the NHS. Commenting on the latest NHS hospital performance statistics for September and October, Deborah Ward, Senior Analyst at The King’s Fund said this: 

            “Today’s stats reveal the worst performance since current records began for ambulance calls, A&Es and waits for planned hospital care. In a normal year any one of these would ring alarm bells; taken together before winter has even begun they suggest a health and care system running hot for such a sustained period whilst still dealing with Covid-19, it is now on its knees"

What this means is that each section of the NHS relies on the performance of other sections. Failure to admit a patient to hospital meant the ambulances had to wait with their patients inside the vehicle. To assist with pressures on hospitals, early discharge was discussed. But this was thought to put too great a strain on primary care, and the GP's. Throughout the last two years the pressures were extreme, there was little slack anywhere in the system. 

We are now moving out of winter and into spring, when in previous years "winter pressures" begin to ease. This is no longer the case. NHS Providers have said that staff absenteeism was increasing (a factor of burn-out), there are now 110,000 staff vacancies within the NHS, and together this meant putting significant pressure of the quality of care, and patient safety.

And like all failing organisations, damaging in-fighting is increasing and making the situation worse. The British Health Alliance has recently reported that many doctors are now resigning from the NHS because the Health Department's insistence that they see more of their patients "face-to-face", rather than by telephone or video. The NHS is becoming an 'own goal' organisation - this following the decision to sack any NHS frontline staff who did not want to take a dangerous Covid-19 vaccine.

Money and Resources

Predictably, Covid-19 has offered the NHS a new excuse for making more financial demands - to turn itself into a Covid-19 only service. As usual, every effort, and every pound of additional money, was put into chasing the virus. Conventional medicine openly admitted it had no treatment, and no vaccine. It led to a panic reaction.The NHS probably felt that it had to be seen doing something, so it led to social distancing, face mask wearing, and lockdown. Normal life was put on hold to protect the sick and the vulnerable, which was sensible enough - but insisted on insisting that healthy should be treated in exactly the same way. This was done to the detriment of all aspects of our social life, our mental health, child development and education, people's business' and livelihoods, the national economy, and much else.

Inevitably, the inability of the NHS to cope with the demands made by the Covid-19 pandemic, leave alone continuing to do their normal work, led to increasing demands for more resources. The government response, from the beginning, was positive -  "anything it took". And it did take a lot! A profoundly unsuccessful 'Test and Trace' scheme was set up - with over £30 billion of taxpayer money - outside the NHS budget. People were not allowed to go to work; so companies had 85% of their employees wages paid by government - costing more £billions - all coming from outside the NHS budget.  

All this expenditure, and more, was made necessary not by the Covid-19 virus, but by the policies pursued by government and the recommendation of 'experts' within conventional medical science.

The budget of October 2021 included a commitment to increase NHS resource budget to over £160 billion by 2024-5, with investment projected to grow by 3.8% annually in real terms. A great deal was made about this money reducing the waiting lists.

At the same time, a new, long-expected policy for social care was announced, with £5.5 million of controversial new taxation announced. However, it was quickly decided that all this money would be given to the NHS - for the next 3 years.

The Guardian outlined the situation.

            "In an effort to get a grip on the crisis, the Chancellor will unveil plans for investment in NHS capital funding this week to help deliver about 30% more elective activity by 2024-25 compared to pre-pandemic levels. This is equivalent to millions more checks, scans and procedures for non-emergency patients."

The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, described the importance of the new investment in no uncertain terms, indicating exactly what he though the money would acheive.

            “We are committed to getting health services back on track and ensuring no one is left waiting for vital tests or treatment. This is a game changing investment in the NHS to make sure we have the right buildings, equipment and systems to get patients the help they need and make sure the NHS is fit for the future.”

Inevitably, and predictably, this was not enough money for the NHS. Dr. Layla McCay, Director of Policy at the NHS Confederation, said health leaders would welcome the funding, but added that it still “falls short” of what is needed “to get services completely back on track”. Medscape outlined the NHS financing debate in more detail at the time. I suspect if Sunak had announced the doubling, or trebling of the NHS budget increase the assessment would have been little different.

In more recent weeks the UK's Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has declared there will be no more new money, that the NHS would have to cope with what it already has. We had to learn to live with Covid-19, an admission that the previous policy, of eliminating the virus could not be met. For the first time, for as long as I can remember, a major UK politician was NOT promising more resources for the NHS. Covid-19 spending, that is, spending on health, had put unprecedented strains of the national budget. And this decision has been taken at a time when the NHS is in dire straights.

This is the inevitable result of the NHS investing its entire budget, exclusively, on pharmaceutical medicine. For the drug companies it has been a bonanza. For the NHS it is bringing forward what has been, for many years, an impossible situation. The NHS will not survive unless, and until, it offers patients medical therapies that work, that make sick patients better, and does not make their illness worse.

I have always supported the principles of the NHS - the provision of medical treatment for all, regardless of income or wealth, at the point of need. But there is one part of this principle that the NHS has failed to provide - the provision of the best treatment. Increasingly it has failed to offer patients anything other than the false promises of pharmaceutical medicine. The NHS is about to learn tht health does not emanate from a bottle of pills, or a jab in the arm. It has become the captive of pharmaceutical medicine, a hostage to the performance of drugs that have done more to damage patient health than improve it. The drugs and vaccine don't cure patients, they harm patients.

And this is why the situation will only get worse; although how much worse it can become without a complete collapse is problematical. But then, the situation can always be blamed on a virus!

I will be back next year at this time with an update.   

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To plot the decline of the NHS over the last decade, this is a list of my previous posts on the un-ending . crisis of the NHS. They describes how the NHS has been brought to its knees.

The NHS Debate (The NHS in Crisis 2011) published in May 2011.

Our doctors in crisis (NHS in Crisis 2015) published in March 2015.

Britain's NHS in crisis (2016) published in February 2016.

NHS in Crisis (2016) published in March 2016.

NHS in Crisis (Winter 2017) published in January 2017.

The NHS Crisis (2017-2018) published in November 2017.

NHS in Crisis (Summer 2018) published in April 2018.

NHS in Crisis (2018-2019) published in October 2018.

NHS Crisis (2019-2020) published in February 2020.

NHS in Crisis (2020) published in June 2020.

NHS in Crisis (Autumn 2020) published in October 2020.

The NHS Crisis (January 2021) published in January 2021.

The NHS Crisis (January 2021). The COVID-19 Pandemic, and an organisation heading for new levels of serious medical failure.

I have been writing about the ongoing crisis in the NHS since 2011, and it has been difficult to find a new angle on it. Each winter, for decades now, the NHS has faced the same crisis: too many sick patients, needing too much expensive medical treatment, with insufficient resources to cope with them. More money is demanded, and the NHS budget has been increased accordingly. Yet however much the NHS budget in increased the crisis returns again. 

• Insufficient funding, we are told, year by year; we need yet more money. 
• Nonsense, I have said; this is not a funding failure, it is a medical failure. The NHS is a prisoner of conventional or pharmaceutical medicine; this is the reason for failure; and no amount of additional money is going to change that. 
• (To see all my previous blogs go to "search" at the top of this page and type "NHS crisis").
  

Spending more and more money on a failing medical system is non-sense; it is a failure to understand, and to properly analyse, what is happening to the NHS.

However, finding a new angle on the NHS crisis this year is much easier. COVID-19 has highlighted the growing failure of pharmaceutical medicine, which means that the NHS crisis cannot be resolved with more money if it is spend on the same thing. Moreover, money is no longer the problem. Since February 2020 the government has effectively given the NHS access to an 'open wallet' from which it has been told to take "whatever is needed" to deal with the pandemic.

So now, it is us, the patients, who have to "save the NHS"!

The conventional medical establishment, including the mainstream media, is telling us that the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the situation; it is the new virus that is causing the problem; it is a completely new situation. Yet this new virus has not really transformed anything. It is the same problem, presented in a slightly different guise. The pandemic is not the problem; it is not even a particularly notable or unusual event.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not particularly different, affecting many more peoplee, or causing more serious sickness than a typical annual influenza epidemic.

We are constantly told the this coronavirus is more infectious, more deadly than the normal flu. If it is it is only marginally so. The overall death rate this year, we are told, is higher than the average death rate. If it is the difference is marginal.

COVID-10 is more of the same old excuse for the annual NHS crisis. This crisis remains what it has always been - a medical failure. The underlying problem has not changed. The NHS has no effective medical treatment to offer. This means that if the symptoms are severe patients are hospitalised; they receive all the NHS's (normally excellent) nursing care. If necessary they can access all the medical facilities intensive care units can offer. But there is no effective treatment through all this, the NHS has admitted this. This means that each patient outcome depends on whether the patient dies (usually of 'underlying health problems'), or is strong enough to survive. All the NHS can do is to take care of the patients, and wait to see which it is to be.

• Conventional medicine has not focus on the immune system, the importance of supporting and strengthening natural immunity through diet, nutrition, vitamin supplementation, and the like. We had to wait for the vaccine, we are told.
• There is no recourse to natural medical therapies, no request for assistance, no interest in what homeopathy, naturopathy Ayurveda, et al, could offer. Natural medicine has proven to be effective in countries like India, Cuba, and with patients everywhere who use their local natural therapists. But these therapists are excluded from the NHS, they have had to operate under the constraints of lockdown.

The NHS lacks imagination. It relies entirely on pharmaceutical medicine. It has no 'plan B'. It has become of creature of a system of medicine that has always demonstrated three main characteristics:

• it is not effective medicine; it is not capable of making sick people better,
• it is not safe medicine; drug and vaccine side effects, adverse reactions and DIE's, have been making sick people sicker now for decades,
• it has always been the most expensive medical system available, largely because it is an inherently dangerous system of medicine.

So the NHS has now become

    >>> a bottomless pit, with a seemingly endless amount of money now being poured into it,

            >>> an organisation with an ongoing inability to meet the demands of sick patients,

                    >>> and which is now asking US - taxpayers and patients- to save IT from total collapse.

So COVID-19 has done nothing other than to push the NHS further towards a terminal state. Neither government nor the mainstream media (MSM) seem willing or even capable of coming to this analysis. The have become part of the conventional medical establishment. As far as they are concerned the NHS remains a national treasure, based on the solid principle of providing people with the best medicine, freely available, at the point of need.

• So we are still being asked to praise and support the NHS, without any attempt to differentiate between supporting good nursing care and ineffective medical treatment. Both are lumped together. The former is praiseworthy and supportable; the latter is not.
  
• There is still no debate, in government, in the MSM, or the NHS, about whether patients are actually being offered the 'best' medicine', or if the monopoly the NHS has given to pharmaceutical medicine constitutes good value for money, or whether it is in the best interests of patients,
• And, perhaps most crucially of all, no-one seems to understand that the NHS has now reached the point when it can no longer make treatment available to everyone, even those patients with the most serious illnesses.
  

Medicine - freely available - at the point of need?

This time-honoured principle of the NHS is now being seriously undermined. The NHS crisis is no longer solely about funding. The seriousness of COVID-19 has been grossly exaggerated, but even so the NHS has clearly demonstrated it is incapable of coping with it. In the oft-repeated words of the Government and the MSM, we have to 'save our NHS'. And who is saving it? Who is paying the price? Patients who are seriously ill, and those who are likely to become serious sick, are saving it, often at the cost of their lives.

• The destruction of the national economy, our livelihoods and jobs, the scale of which mirrors only the calamity previously caused by the two world wars, is causing unprecedented levels of harm to mental health, with markedly increased levels of anxiety, depression and suicide,
• Enforced isolation and loneliness has led to rising levels of social distress,
• There have been rising levels of family breakdown and domestic violence, and apparently, even a significant increase in child sexual abuse,
  
• Increased levels of alcohol and substance abuse will inevitably lead to more sickness, and increased need for medical treatment,
  
• An estimated 27 million doctor appointments have been 'lost', and it is estimated that over 350,000 urgent cancer referrals may have been missed because patients believed (with good reason) that the hospitals could not cope with additional demands,
• About 50,000 "non-urgent" operations have been 'delayed'; many of these will no longer be required when patients die; and when the back-log is tackled, many patients will be considerably sicker.

So the workload of the NHS will not reduce; it will increase as a direct result of its failure to cope with the COVID-19 influenza outbreak.

This is rationing in action. Although it is not being called rationing at the moment, important decisions will have to be taken about who is, and who is not going to receive treatment for their illnesses. This is the new feature of the 2021 NHS crisis. It will get worse over the next 2-3 months. And (pandemic or no pandemic) it will return again in the winter or 2021-2022, and I will be writing about it.

NHS in Crisis (Autumn 2020). Coronavirus COVID-19 is confirmation that conventional medicine is failing us

The NHS is now in a constant financial crisis. Coronavirus COVID-19 may be clouding the overall picture but look underneath the bluster and panic the pandemic has caused and there is, in effect, no difference to the annual NHS crisis which I have been describing for the last 10 years (to see this series of blogs, type 'NHS in Crisis' in the search bar above). The main features of the crisis, every year, are:

• The NHS is a prisoner of the conventional medical establishment, which has no effective treatment for most chronic disease, and all infections; coronavirus is just another infection.
  
• People get sick, become patients, and as the NHS has little effective treatment, they do not get better; they continue to be sick, and in need of treatment.
  
• Most treatment involves patients taking pharmaceutical drugs and vaccine, and the main outcome is that they actually get sicker - through their well-known adverse drug reactions which are outlined in conventional medicine's own literature.
• As people don't get better, and conventional medical treatment makes them sicker, demands for health services increase, and the NHS cannot meet demand for treatment; it causes a financial crisis, and the NHS demands more money for more treatment; treatments that do not work, and made us sicker.
  
• The government provides more money, which increases the amount of largely ineffective, and harmful treatment; this leads to an increasing patient demand for medical services, and NHS demands for yet more funding.

And so the crisis perpetuates itself, year by year. The main result is that the NHS is now a gigantic organisation, built upon its ongoing failure to meet patient treatment needs, plus the willingness of successive governments to fund this growing monster.

So how has coronavirus COVID-19 changed this situation?

1. Coronavirus COVID-19 is an infection for which conventional medicine has no treatment. This is not new, but faced with an new, highly infectious disease, the NHS has been scared into a full-scale panic. It fears that demand for treatment, by sick people, it will be overwhelmed, and thousands of patients will die. The government has bought into this fear, that the NHS will be overwhelmed, and this has led to its central strategy - to "Save the NHS", which has become its constant mantra.
2. The absence of effective treatment for COVID-19 is not a new phenomenon for the NHS. Conventional medicine has always had a paucity of effective treatment - for any illness. The inability of the NHS to treat serious illness and disease successfully is the reason for its failure, and has been an integral part, the major cause, of the ongoing annual NHS crisis.
3. COVID-19 has certainly increased the degree of panic within both government and the NHS. Although the number of patients hospitalised, and the number of people dying have not been significantly greater than in other recent years, the policies of panic we are witnessing are doing unprecedented harm to our social life, and to our economy.
4. The pandemic has, however, led to the cessation/postponement of many other NHS treatments for illness and diseases far more serious than coronavirus. Routine testing, treatments and operations have been stopped in order to provide the NHS with greater capacity to deal with COVID-19 patient. In recent years this has been done during the annual winter crises, but this year this has been  extended through the summer, and into the autumn; and is likely to continue until the spring - at least. The result is that waiting lists have gone through the roof, and it is expected/feared that this may lead to an increased number of non-coronavirus deaths, almost certainly more than the deaths caused by COVID-19.
5. SO FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME THE NHS HAS HAD TO ADMIT THAT IT CAN NO LONGER TREAT EVERY PATIENT, IT CANNOT COPE WITH THE LEVEL OF SICKNESS AND DISEASE THAT EXISTS.
   
6. The coronavirus panic has also been successful in removing any semblance of financial constraint. The nation's coffers are now wide open. After 10 years of austerity the new Conservative government, elected in December 2019, was already planning to increase spending on the NHS by £billions. Now it has discovered the 'magic money tree' so that it can spend much more than it had planned on health services.
   
7. The current crisis is no longer seasonal, it has now stretched beyond the winter, in the spring and summer, and now into the Autumn and winter. It has become an annual event lasting a full year. Will this continue? We will see
   
8. The only sign of an NHS (conventional medicine) saviour is a new vaccine, which does not exist, which is being rushed through its trials, at enormous cost to government and taxpayer (and enormous profit for the pharmaceutical industry).
   

So the NHS crisis of 2020, which will now run through the winter into 2021, is merely an extension of what I have been writing about over the years. It is no different. There may be no NHS demands for increased resources but this is because it has now been given a blank cheque; effectively it can now spend whatever it wants to spend, regardless of whether it will bankrupt the national economy. 

And whatever money the NHS spends it will be spent on more conventional medical treatment, which will once again prove to be ineffective, and add to the level of sickness - as it has done now for decades.

The vaccine, for instance, will be rushed through the testing process; the people who have become sick in the vaccine trials to date will be forgotten; or paid off; it may not be effective (no vaccine for any strain of coronavirus has ever been effective); it will cause more patient harm (our government has already recognised it is likely to harm patients by agreeing to indemnify drug companies from any harm their vaccine causes).

Perhaps there are two changes that the coronavirus COVID-19 panic might bring about. First, it will throw the NHS more deeply into crisis, a more permanent crisis. Second, the disastrous social and economic outcomes of the pandemic will bring to people's attention to the failure of conventional medicine. 

• Why is it that we cannot see our relatives in hospital, in care homes, or even attend their funerals?
• Why is it that we cannot hug our grandchildren?
• Why is it that we cannot socialise with our friends?
• Why is it that our freedoms and liberties being undermined?
  
• Why is it that we have lost our job in what were viable, profitable companies and industries?

The outcome of Coronavirus COVID-19 might just be that it leads to a re-assessment of a system of medical care that kills, allows patients to die, destroys economies, and social life - as the result of an infectious disease?

There are so many questions gradually surfacing now amongst the people. The are arising from the inadequacy and failure of hand-washing, social distancing, lockdowns, and similar policies - all seeking to 'chase the dreaded virus'. 

Any successful medical system would not be chasing the virus. This has always been a pointless task; we have always shared our world with bugs, bacteria and viruses. An effective medical system would, instead, be ensuring that we all, each one of us, focused on our immune system, and how we are able to strengthen and support our ability to cope with infections. 

And this is just what homeopathy, and other natural medical therapies do; and have been doing throughout the pandemic.

NHS IN CRISIS. 2020. Another routine annual winter crisis notwithstanding Coronavirus COVIS-19.

Apologies. The disruption caused by the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has delayed the writing of this, now, annual blog. The fear and panic generated by medical science, government and media  in response to the virus, still ongoing, has taken the focus away from what would otherwise have been the usual winter NHS crisis >> increased patient demand >> inability to cope >> demands for more resources.

Yet crisis it undoubtedly is, just like any other year, but perhaps just a trifle more serious. Once government and the conventional medical establishment realised there was an epidemic, and no conventional treatment, everything else hitherto considered important was thrown out - the baby alongside with the bathwater. Government policy made this clear.

STAY HOME - this was the central policy, an alternative to effective medical treatment, that has led inevitably to all the social, educational and economic distress and mayhem that it caused, and continues to cause.

..... SAVE THE NHS - the first stated, and primary objective of policy. It was made clear from the start that government knew conventional medicine, and the NHS, would be overwhelmed, and they determined that this had to be avoided at any cost as a top priority.

.......... SAVE LIVES - the next objective, something statistics can even now demonstrate has singularly failed. Fantastic hospital care, but no treatment, with NHS staff having to watch helplessly whilst over 40,000 people died in front of them.

• From March onwards more and more money was pumped into the NHS - "whatever it takes" according to government rhetoric. At some point, maybe, we will be told exactly how much additional money has been spent to prop up a failed medical system.

• At the same time most 'routine' work with cancer, heart and other priority patients was cancelled or postponed. Dealing with the virus was now the priority - saving the NHS from collapse. In addition, the panic generated by the NHS discouraged people from seeing their doctors, or attending  hospital, when formerly they might have done.

So the consequences of NHS, and conventional medical failure this year is going to stretch onwards into the rest of the year, and beyond. This morning, 10th June 2020), BBC News heralded some of the early cries of alarm that underline the new 2020 NHS crisis. Here are the headlines, taken from the NHS Confederation, a body representing health and care leaders from organisations that commission and provide health services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

• NHS bosses fear the Covid-19 crisis could see the number of people waiting for NHS treatment double to 10 million by the end of the year.
• NHS Confederation projections show that the NHS waiting list is expected to rise from about 4.2 million currently to about 10 million by Christmas.
• It says that the NHS faces an "uphill battle" trying to restart cancer, stroke and heart care services, whilst at the same time continuing to manage thousands of sick and recovering Covid-19 patient.

Predictably the NHS Confederation said that more money would be needed. Equally predictably the Department of Health responded, saying it will continue to provide the resources, funding and support the NHS needs. So the never-ending pattern of NHS failure continues.

>>> sickness >>> money >>> more sickness >>> more money >>> even more sickness >>> etc

>>> sickness >>> treatment >>> still sick >>> drug side effects >>> more sickness >>> more treatment >>> even more side effects >>> even more sickness >>> etc

The NHS crisis of winter 2020 has been different only in that there has been one serious additional problem - coronavirus has led to the death of rather more people than usually die of influenza every year. In most years 'routine' surgery is cancelled. This year the panic response has led to the termination of all treatment for people with cancer, heart disease, stroke, and other serious medical conditions.

So will the outcome be any different? It might be. Even the NHS Confederation provides this warning for the future.

               "The bigger point being made by the confederation is that the government in Westminster needs to think very hard about how the health service is managed in the months ahead and how patients' expectations should be prepared." (my emphasis).


Managing patient expectations! What does this mean? In past years government money has always been made available to the NHS so that they are able to meet the ever-increasing patient demand for treatment. It is these demands that are now going to have to be managed, the implication being that ploughing even more money into the NHS may prove to be difficult. Why is this?

The demand side is not changing. Conventional medicine's inability to treat illness is ongoing; conventional medical treatment continues to generate increasing levels of illness and disease; and coronavirus is predicted to continue, adding yet more demands on NHS treatment (treatment it does not have).

The supply side, however, is weakening. The lockdown policies pursued by the government, an alternative to effective medical treatment, is destroying the economy. A recession is in prospect, perhaps even a depression. Millions are losing their jobs; they will require government expenditure on unemployment benefits, et al. At the same time tax revenues will be drastically reduced. There are already demands for additional government spending in every other part of the national economy - education, social care, police, local government - almost everywhere you look.

So perhaps for the very first time the UK government will find itself unable to respond to the constant demands for increased NHS funding. There will be a health crisis that cannot be hidden, brushed under the carpet, by yet more spending. Perhaps then more searching questions will begin to be asked.

• Why is the huge £150 billion NHS budget not enough?
• What value, in terms of patient outcomes, does the NHS actually provide?
• Why aren't patients getting better with conventional medical treatment?
• Why is chronic disease, in all its many guises, increasing so rapidly, year by year?
• Why is there no conventional medical treatment for infectious diseases wherever, and whenever they occur?
• IS THERE NOT A BETTER, MORE EFFECTIVE WAY TO SPEND THE HEALTH BUDGET?

The NHS had transformed itself into a monopoly supplier of one type of medicine. It is deeply hostile to natural medical therapies, like homeopathy, which it has almost totally barred them from the NHS. So whatever the problems the NHS now faces they have been caused by conventional medicine - its inability make sick people well, its willingness to use treatments whose 'side effects'  demonstrably cause patient harm.

Perhaps then the NHS will be forced to look at what some other countries are doing, like Cuba, and India (particularly in one southern province, Kerala), where patient outcome comparisons can now be made between conventional and natural medical treatment.

Or perhaps I am being too optimistic. The pharmaceutical industry remains financially strong, and it uses its wealth to control the NHS, the government, and the mainstream media. Too few people have analysed what is happening - that we are constantly throwing more and more money into a bottomless pit.