Is NHS underfunding actually at root of COVID restrictions?

[Sleepdeprived42long]

From what I can gather, appears new variants are leading to less serious outcomes (inc death) than previous but the number of people infected is much greater due to increase in transmissibility. So seems to me the concern is the increase in number with COVID might lead to more hospitalisations, which might overwhelm the NHS.

The NHS is a public body. It can only provide what it is given funds to do. If the NHS cannot provide a service, it is because it has not been given adequate funds to do so. Perhaps the millions that were spent on furlough when infection numbers were low would have been better spent making sure that our rates of pay for NHS staff were competitive (to attract more staff and retain current) and making sure we had hospital facilities that could cope with an increase in demand, rather than only just manage (and many weren’t even able to do that) which I think is where many health trusts/boards were pre-COVID.

To be very clear, this is not a bashing of the NHS thread, the opposite in fact. Nor is it a political one. I’m just really struggling to see how we have ended up in this position where we seem to be facing more restrictions in due course, although we have had almost 2 years to properly prepare our NHS not to be overwhelmed??? Just me??

This sort of what happened with the railways. Underfund it, public get tired of it then ultimately it gets public support for being sold off.

My friend is a nurse and works a lot of bank hours as they are so short staffed. This was over the summer too not just covid so they were never going to have enough staff to cover covid.

So when the government say we need to protect the nhs it is a political issue but they're not funding it and no one wants to pay extra taxes to pay for it. Tories support big business they're not, and never have been, interested in the nhs/schools etc. Lockdown, even with furlough, is the cheaper option for them.

Yes underfunding of the nhs

Also decades of inaction on social care. Bed blocking is a HUGE issue. And the number of elderly patients being admitted because they actually need ongoing care & they/families have reached crisis point, or illness/accident has occurred due to lower standards of care than they need is q horrifying.

@VaguelyInteresting very true. Was the 10,000 figure given the other day for the number of people who are ‘fit for discharge’ but have nowhere to go?

The nhs is overwhelmed every winter. This year, staff are getting ill and they’re also having to isolate for 10 days even if they’re ill for 3. This is going to cause massive strain.

Over however many years, the NHS’s bed capacity has been reduced. I read that the NHS has one of the lowest beds per head in equivalent/similar healthcare systems across the world.

So it’s no wonder we can’t cope with a pandemic. And I’m sure many governments of similar mindsets have done similar to their healthcare systems. Ours has just been squeezed more.

Also my perception of what the underfunding issue is- it’s staffing. From recruitment numbers and training to salaries.

HCPs working in hospital and prehospital care particularly have had a shitty shitty deal for YEARS. From the impossible (and frankly dangerous) rotas for junior doctors to the shit pay for staff across the board but especially nurses - hand in hand with a high pressure, low thanks job... it’s no wonder people are racing out of the NHS.

I’m not NHS by the way!

I would ABSOLUTELY pay more tax for a better funded NHS (and dentistry!) and particularly a better pay deal for staff. Also social care. Would happily pay more tax for that.

I might be in the minority. Suspect I am.

@VaguelyInteresting

Also my perception of what the underfunding issue is- it’s staffing. From recruitment numbers and training to salaries.

HCPs working in hospital and prehospital care particularly have had a shitty shitty deal for YEARS. From the impossible (and frankly dangerous) rotas for junior doctors to the shit pay for staff across the board but especially nurses - hand in hand with a high pressure, low thanks job... it’s no wonder people are racing out of the NHS.

I’m not NHS by the way!

I would ABSOLUTELY pay more tax for a better funded NHS (and dentistry!) and particularly a better pay deal for staff. Also social care. Would happily pay more tax for that.

I might be in the minority. Suspect I am.

Agree with all this

Note also that covid has delayed training for many, there is a bottleneck of unqualified students who have not been able to access the training they need to meet registration requirements (I am in practice education in my profession)

Years of cuts in the name of increasing efficiency and 'managing patient expectations', while still feeding into the 'free service for all your needs' fiction. Every year there was a winter crisis where the very predictable increase in demand over winter month created more headlines about hours of waiting at a&e, targets were routinely missed before, staff were leaving. Covid only highlighted previous problems.

Other countries with completely differently funded health services are also locking down and close to being "overwhelmed" so no.

I don’t disagree that the NHS is chronically underfunded and that there are some massive structural issues which need to be addressed.

But as others have pointed out this is a distinction between the “steady state” position and the “crisis” position. In the best possible world the NHS could never be funded to be ready for an epidemic virus with the growth rates we are currently seeing for Omicron.

This trope that sorting out NHS underfunding will magically relieve Covid pressures has become a bit of an antivaxxer figleaf at the moment: “But but but NHS is not properly funded so let me crack ok in my ignorance.”

A bit like My Body My Choice.

I am very suspicious of this narrative being parroted as an excuse for not getting the vaccine. It’s yet another smokescreen.

@Chessie678

It seems like the NHS is overwhelmed right now but there aren't actually all that many covid patients in hospital. There are 7,611 by the latest count and around 800 on ventilators. Now clearly that could go up very substantially over the next few weeks but we are currently talking about a tiny percentage of the population in hospital with covid and a small percentage of overall hospital beds. Just a few thousand extra beds would likely make a significant difference to our ability to deal with covid. I refuse to believe that given the huge human and economic cost of the alternative (lockdown), we couldn't have increased capacity by those few thousand beds in the last two years. Perhaps it would have been too difficult to find the staff but it's the fact that there doesn't even seem to have been a genuine attempt to do so which really bothers me. There are plenty of nurses not currently working in nursing or people from allied professions who might have been tempted back or being capable of being trained to be helpful if enough resource had been put into this. We could have taken staff from abroad with a sufficiently lucrative offer and attractive visa regime (though the ethics of that would be dubious right now). We could have made sure that patients who were ready to be discharged but had no care in place had that care available (that alone could have freed up 10% of beds at some points this year). There are loads of possibilities which could have been explored with sufficient political will and funding which may have helped at least a bit - but all the political will and funding has gone into locking the whole population up so that the NHS has these extra few thousand beds available. The government has been willing to spend billions on covid related policies but relatively tiny amounts on the NHS.

The NHS seems to be treated as fixed in its current capacity and structure. In future, the issue may not even be covid but an aging population who need more healthcare than they used to (which is increasingly likely the more we put our population through lockdowns in which their physical and mental health suffers).

We seem to be in a position where the price for often inadequate healthcare is giving up social interaction, education, hospitality, entertainment etc.

I should say that my experience of NHS staff has always been very positive but you can't have a health service which requires the whole population to live under lockdown in order to function (ironically becoming increasingly less healthy).

100% this.

@Mouseonmychair

What about the German and Dutch health service are they underfunded too? They also have restrictions.

They are introducing restrictions so that their health systems can continue more or less as they are, they do not have 6m plus waiting for treatment or 13hr waits at AE and people spending hours (and dying) in the back of ambulances.

Or people not getting cancer treatments, which is what is happening to my former line manager right now.

The pandemic has actually attracted nurses- more people are training to be nurses than ever before which is great news!

20k students, whilst the NHS has at least 40k vacancies, many are overseas students, some wont qualify, some will go into the private sector, more into agencies.
Its no where near enough and will not address the very hi levels of staff turn over or monies spent on agency staff.

@Chessie678 great post.

More nursing students is great, but it’s no good if there aren’t any placements for them, they can’t achieve required clinical competencies etc

This is a combination of both a stretched service (both generally and due to the pressure of the pandemic) and covid restrictions

@thepeopleversuswork I’m not an anti vaxxer so wasn’t aware of this. I think the vaccine is the right way to give people as much personal protection against COVID. But on the basis we have nothing else left to defend ourselves with, there is going to have to be an acceptance at some point that we will need to get on with life. What we don’t want to do though is risk people not getting medical treatment (due to COVID or anything else) as a result. Which is why I think the NHS should have been properly funded to take action to avoid being overwhelmed.

[quote Sleepdeprived42long]@thepeopleversuswork I’m not an anti vaxxer so wasn’t aware of this. I think the vaccine is the right way to give people as much personal protection against COVID. But on the basis we have nothing else left to defend ourselves with, there is going to have to be an acceptance at some point that we will need to get on with life. What we don’t want to do though is risk people not getting medical treatment (due to COVID or anything else) as a result. Which is why I think the NHS should have been properly funded to take action to avoid being overwhelmed.[/quote]
I totally agree that the NHS should be properly funded.

But you get a lot of this logic on here which goes (roughly): "Years of underfunding have left the NHS on its knees, this is the Tories' fault and not my problem. I shouldn't have to take a vaccine just because the government hasn't funded the NHS."

Which is nonsense. It's a bit like saying the government hasn't done enough to reduce emissions and prioritise the environment so I can drive a diesel car everywhere and chuck plastic bags in my garden because its not my problem.

It boils down to a lack of responsibility and a willingness to blame everything on someone else.

It has certainly left the NHS in a precarious position but other countries with better funded health services are in lockdown (Denmark, the Netherlands. The Netherlands health service is often ranked as one of the best in the world.

I haven’t RTFT but the rest of Europe has, in general, more restrictions than we do but no NHS.

@BungleandGeorge

It’s not only about the NHS, having a lot of sick people at the same time would stop our society from functioning. From emergency services to shops, to bankers, to IT, to utilities, to haulage the list goes on. Too few workers able to work would have a major impact on everyone. Not to mention a lot are interrelated and can’t function without the others. We’ve had a taste of shortages and lack of power etc and it would be a lot worse..

But if the NHS was funded properly so that it was able to deal with an increase in patients over winter months. Then they could scrap the isolating of people who are just sat there twiddling their thumbs because a test is telling them they're ill.

@Sleepdeprived42long - so what's the alternative? The government cannot reverse nearly 12 years of underfunding quickly, even if it wanted too. NHS staff are on their knees.

The NHS today is not the same as when it was created

No party, of whatever colour, will do what is needed to fully modernise and reduce waste 😳