![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
07-01-2022, 04:07 PM
The NHS was already collapsing long before the arrival of Covid | Polly Toynbee
Even the ravages of the pandemic won’t prompt the kind of funding it needs. Once again, it will just have to ‘cope’When is the NHS overwhelmed? When it has used up ways to describe the state it’s in. Ask Alastair McLellan, editor of the Health Service Journal. “We’ve run out of language,” he says. “We’ve exhausted the adverbs and adjectives, the thesaurus has run dry.” But when exactly did the NHS cross a red line? “I won’t provide a definition of what being overwhelmed would constitute,” Boris Johnson says wisely. Yet it’s happening now, and there’s no sign of the situation improving.TV news may need images of stretchers laid out on winter pavements, but ambulances were already queueing for hours outside A&Es before the pandemic. We hear of ambulance services telling patients with heart attacks and strokes to get a lift to hospital. Even during the winters before Covid, we’d grown used to trolleys lined up in corridors and 12-hour admission waits. GP appointments had long grown scarce. Cancer delays are the longest on record. Expect no tipping points: “This is the new normal,” a London teaching hospital medical director warns me.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
https://clck.ru/agp5L
#NHS #Coronavirus #Health #Conservatives #Public_sector_cuts
Even the ravages of the pandemic won’t prompt the kind of funding it needs. Once again, it will just have to ‘cope’When is the NHS overwhelmed? When it has used up ways to describe the state it’s in. Ask Alastair McLellan, editor of the Health Service Journal. “We’ve run out of language,” he says. “We’ve exhausted the adverbs and adjectives, the thesaurus has run dry.” But when exactly did the NHS cross a red line? “I won’t provide a definition of what being overwhelmed would constitute,” Boris Johnson says wisely. Yet it’s happening now, and there’s no sign of the situation improving.TV news may need images of stretchers laid out on winter pavements, but ambulances were already queueing for hours outside A&Es before the pandemic. We hear of ambulance services telling patients with heart attacks and strokes to get a lift to hospital. Even during the winters before Covid, we’d grown used to trolleys lined up in corridors and 12-hour admission waits. GP appointments had long grown scarce. Cancer delays are the longest on record. Expect no tipping points: “This is the new normal,” a London teaching hospital medical director warns me.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
https://clck.ru/agp5L
#NHS #Coronavirus #Health #Conservatives #Public_sector_cuts
