BBC Radio 4’s ‘Call You and Yours’ programme of 10 January 2017 was themed “What’s Your Experience of the NHS in Winter?”. It carried a remarkable segment that the vast majority of people will have missed.
That segment contained coverage of a major, ongoing disaster at a northern NHS Trust that encapsulates the crisis that is engulfing the NHS to such a catastrophic extent that the International Red Cross declared it an emergency and was forced to step in to prevent a complete collapse at various Trusts across the country.
And it showed that the Prime Minister, Theresa May, is not only aware of what’s happening – but is trying to keep hidden from the British public.
In the segment in question, a BBC journalist spoke to a senior clinician at a major Trust in the north about scale of crisis the Trust was facing. Here’s how the journalist described what he heard:
Well, I’ve never heard words like this and I’ve been a journalist for 27 years.
I’ve been told there was a meeting at one of these hospitals last Thursday. About a hundred members of staff were there, including consultants, nurses and department heads and union leaders.
They were told by the hospital Chief Executive that the average ambulance wait should have been 8 minutes but they were actually 40 minutes for urgent things like chest pains.
And one man had a cardiac arrest and waited 5 hours on a trolley in A&E, that’s just at this hospital.
The trust had bought in extra beds, even though there was no money to do it. And the staff were told it was the worst the trust had ever seen in its history.
They shut out patients, they considered cancelling cancer patient treatment for whom they couldn’t do it safely because of low staffing levels.
Unions were there because nurses were unhappy saying that the staff were being moved between departments and it left them feeling as if they were working unsafely.
And I’ve been told the hospital Chief Executive told the staff ‘if you or your family live here and make a 999 call, you are at serious risk of not receiving the treatment you need’.
And then it was suggested, the Chief Executive of the hospital should go to the press.
And the response was that they’d been given instructions, that Theresa May, the Prime Minister, didn’t want any of this to get out.
As the BBC reporter observed, this hospital is just one of many experiencing this scale of disaster. For example, Mid Essex Trust has implemented shocking emergency measures, as health journalist Shaun Lintern discovered:
Jeremy Hunt, the worst Health Secretary in history, claimed yesterday that there is no NHS crisis, stating that ‘only one or two’ are struggling. Theresa May – in spite of being called out by the Chair of the Commons Health Committee who is a member of the Tory party – continues to claim that the government is putting £10bn more into the NHS.
Not only are May and Hunt flat-out lying about Tory treatment of the NHS, but Theresa May has ‘given instructions’ to NHS executives to keep the scale of the crisis she has caused secret.
When a governing party is prepared to tell outright lies on the most important thing we have as a country and to instruct those who run hospitals to hide the truth, we have a bandit government.
And there’s only one way to deal with bandits. Bring them down and lock them up. Let’s make sure Mrs May’s desire for secrecy is thwarted.
Our NHS, our health and the health of our loved ones demand it.
(Hat-tip to @summerof69Nine for invaluable help with the transcript)
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unums ceo seen salivating at this news ready for his company to make a killing oh dear
Once again it is time to recall Mark Britnell’s 2000 speech to the private-sector executives slavering over the prospects of health wealth: “The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years”. Though well under way it is taking a bit longer than he predicted but the policy remains. We can see that very clearly now. The NHS is allowed to perish while the vultures hover. You cannot expect May to abrogate her free market faith. she wouldn’t remain leader of her party for long if she did.
John Airs
I know for fact NHS are failing the public. I suffered a 2nd stroke in July 2016. Ambulance was called at 01.30am on a Thursday. Call handlers were well advised that it was a 2nd stroke I was suffering. The ambulance crew arrived an hour later and were very rude. Upon 1st call , my husband were advised help was on way..2nd call they were still on way, 3rd call was when they were actually dispatched! I have this all in writing because I made complaint and received response following investigation. They admitted failing response times and failing to send 1st response car even though one was available. Strokes were reduced to Amber response times in 2015..they have since been raised again to red !….. I am 43 years old and currently still off work with weak right side. I has completely paralysed following stroke hospitalised and had 6 weeks physio just to walk. So much for the FAST adverts. If I had received treatment sooner I may not be classed as disabled now. So yes , we the public are in danger of not receiving the care we deserve.
Karina, our Group 38 degrees Gloucestershire worked with ambulance crews who gave us detailed information relating to how the service is currently being delivered compared to how it was before.
Around 2014 we have campaigned to make our local MPs, Tory and Liberal to understand what was happening, the truth is they didn’t want to know and so we made them a their constituents take up the issues directly with the ambulance service, in other words the most we could get them to do was act as postmen delivering the questions we put.
We spelled out then everything that you no doubt suffered even before it reached the epidemic proportions it has today.
It can all be summed by, underfunding, undermanning, hospital and ambulance station closures.
This has been deliberate policy, nothing that is happening is by chance, we predicted (via the ambulance crews) that people will die of it, but no one wanted to listen.
You can lay the blame squarely on the Tories and the Libdems they knew then as they know now, but as Noam Chomsky said:
“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
Noam Chomsky,
It all comes from the United States, that is why they can tell us what is happening before it does happen here.
These vile Tories are not fit to govern.