Several doctors’ organizations warned, on Monday, of the crisis affecting the emergency services in Britain, where many patients “die” due to “not receiving adequate or timely care,” and called on the government to respond to this growing social “resentment”.
The public and free British health service system, the NHS, has been suffering for more than 10 years from severe austerity and then from the repercussions of the epidemic, which left it completely exhausted.
And this crisis, which regularly makes headlines in British newspapers, reappeared on Sunday, when the organization that represents emergency personnel, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, estimated that between 300 and 500 patients died every week due to a lack of care in emergency departments, especially long waiting lines.
Hospital officials played down the numbers, but the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine defended the estimates on Monday. “If you’re on the ground, you know this is a long-term problem, not a short-term one,” Ian Higginson told the BBC, rejecting the hypothesis of temporary difficulties.
And last week, one in five patients who were transported by ambulances in England had to wait more than an hour to enter the emergency room. Tens of thousands of patients were also forced to wait more than 12 hours before receiving care in emergency departments.
The government attributes the current situation to the repercussions of the Covid-19 epidemic and winter epidemics such as influenza, and confirms that it wants to make more efforts for hospitals, but it has recently launched a very strict budget savings policy.
Thus, the requests for increases submitted by nurses who carried out the first strike movement in December were rejected, while inflation exceeded 10 percent for months.
The British Medical Association, an association of carers, joined the alarm on Monday. “It is not true that the country does not have the means to fix this mess,” its president, Phil Banfield, said in a statement.
“It is a political choice and patients are dying unnecessarily because of this choice,” he added.
He considered that the current situation “cannot continue,” calling for “immediate” action by the government.
In his New Year’s wishes, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak indicated that the British health system is one of his priorities, stressing that his government is taking “decisive” measures to reduce delays in the public health system.