Will the NHS ever get what it needs from Conservatives?

The first duty of a government is the safety of its people. But few things are more important to safety than health.

Earlier in this year it was dentistry in the news. The BBC found that nine in 10 NHS dental practices across the UK are not accepting new adult patients for treatment under the health service.

But surely health care ought to be in the news every day with the challenges it faces. Long waits to be seen in primary care, all ambulance trusts recently on the highest alert level, over 6 million people are waiting for treatment and emergency department 4 hour waits six times higher than the standard.

Don't blame Covid or Ukraine: all this has been getting worse since 2015.

When challenged on any of these, the usual Conservative response is to tell us how many £millions are being thrown at the problem. But you can be pretty sure that a bit of clever accounting hides that it wasn't new money at all. And the solution is rarely money. Since all these services are staff intensive, no amount of money can immediately increase them. It would have needed long term effective planning, which has been strikingly absent. It's ironic that Jeremy Hunt who, as minister for health and social care, presided for so many years over this decline highlighted the need for a staffing plan during the summer and before he became Chancellor during the recent (and continuing) chaos in government. Still not much sign of action though.

Where to begin on staffing? For years the NHS has been short of staff, both in those essential but low paid jobs, such care assistants, cleaners, porters, as well as in all the other professions that make up a caring and effective service. Possibly the most important current cause of staff shortage is the shortage itself: conscientious staff know they are regularly failing to give the quality of care they want to and that they used to be able to give. Also regularly having to do more because no-one fills the post beside you does not help. As to pay you see the private health sector keeps pace with inflation, but not the NHS. The Government, big sections of the media and, increasingly the patients, blame it all on staff and morale drops further. Is that what they really want?

Just to put in some numbers: over 100,000 (8%) posts are vacant across the NHS, about 40,000 (10%) of these in nursing. The Government promised 6000 more GPs in 2020 but the number of fully qualified GPs has been contracting since 2015. More GPs are retiring than are joining. Around half of hospital consultant vacancies advertised in the last year have remained unfilled.

Increasing delays and falling standards lead some to question the NHS model of health care free at the point of delivery. Is that precisely what our Conservative Government always wanted: hand it over to the private sector?