The NHS is ‘struggling’ but ‘not destroyed’ despite the enormous challenges it faces, England’s chief health officer says.
In a major speech on Wednesday, Amanda Pritchard urged the party that once won the general election to give the NHS more money, fix social care and tackle public health threats such as junk food.
Strong government action was needed to prevent the NHS becoming “an expensive safety net” that picked up the pieces of people damaged by obesity, mental illness and gambling problems, which was now being exacerbated by people using “not -regulated cryptocurrency markets,” she said.
Speaking to the NHS ConfedExpo conference of healthcare bosses in Manchester, the CEO of NHS England acknowledged that maternity care, mental health care, GP waiting times and patient safety were not good enough.
But she refuted the claim she made in recent years some politicians and healthcare workers, that the NHS was “broken”.
“It is important to recognize where we need to do better for patients. But it is also important that we do not collude with defeatism,” Pritchard said. “Yes, the post-Covid NHS has been damaged, but not destroyed. It’s struggling, but it’s still doing incredible things every day.”
Some politicians, such as shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, have seen the service’s deepening struggles in recent years as evidence that it is ‘broken’ by fourteen years of Conservative underfunding and their failure to understand the scale of the staffing crisis.
Others, such as right-wing think tanks, have argued that the NHS’s huge waiting list and inability to provide timely care showed that the model of a taxpayer-funded service that is available to all and free at the time of need is not had a longer shelf life.
Pritchard made it clear that whoever was in power on July 5 would have to take bold action to help the NHS survive in its current form and cope with an aging and increasingly sick population.
A large expected increase in the coming years in the number of people with at least one long-term condition, and in those suffering from mental illness, would mean there is “more demand, which means more capacity is needed”, she said.
“More people, more places, more equipment, more medicine. And all these things add up to more costs” — at a time when population changes mean more people paying taxes, she said.
The next government will need to give the NHS more capital funding to repair crumbling buildings, buy equipment and build new facilities. The cost of tackling the backlog of maintenance repairs has risen to almost £12 billion.
Citing the opening of 30 NHS clinics to help severely obese children, and a recent sharp increase in the number of people in England with a precursor to type 2 diabetes – “a disease caused by junk food and obesity” – she stressed that “ we (the NHS) cannot solve this alone”.
She added that it was urgent to “increase capacity and quality in social care – a question we still need an answer to…(which is) vital… on the things everyone wants the NHS to achieve , whether that means shorter waiting lists or faster emergency care.” ”.