England’s National Health Service is in deep trouble, report finds
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The hard-hitting review, published late on Sept 11, was commissioned by Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
LONDON – England’s National Health Service (NHS), one of the country’s most revered institutions, is in “critical” condition, according to a government-commissioned report that cited long waits for treatment, crumbling hospitals, mental health patients in “vermin-infested cells” and far fewer MRI scanners than in comparable countries.
The hard-hitting review, published late on Sept 11, was commissioned by Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The dire state of the NHS was a key reason many people voted for his Labour Party in July,
But the report underscores the scale of the challenge the government faces to revive a health care system that is in a spiral of decline after years of underinvestment and administrative meddling.
Mr Starmer said in comments released on Sept 11 that he was working on a 10-year plan that could amount to the “biggest reimagining of our NHS” since its creation in 1948.
The report, written by Dr Ara Darzi, a surgeon and member of the House of Lords, said that during the 2010s, when a Conservative-led government embarked on a stringent austerity programme, the NHS was “starved of capital”, leading it to fall behind in investing in equipment, technology and buildings.
His findings will not surprise Britons, whose satisfaction in the health service is “at its lowest ever”, the report said. Still, even Dr Darzi, who has spent three decades in the NHS, said that he was “shocked” by what he discovered.
Mr Starmer described the findings as “unforgivable” in comments released before a speech on Sept 12, in which he plans to argue that the health service must “reform or die”.
He said his government would focus on digitising the NHS, moving care from overburdened hospitals to other settings in the community and investing in preventive health care.
Dr Darzi’s report was particularly damning of the major restructuring of the NHS in 2012 by then Conservative Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, which the report described as “a calamity”.
The health service’s capacity was “degraded by disastrous management reforms”, he wrote, while “the trust and good will of many front-line staff has been lost”.
The changes were intended to encourage more competition in health provision but were criticised for creating a fragmented and complex structure.
Chronic problems that had built up over years became acute when Covid-19 hit, and the NHS entered the pandemic with fewer available beds and fewer staff than most other high-income health systems, the report said. NYTIMES
