NHS GC knocked off its perch

 It is ironic that our National Health Service, within weeks of being honoured by the award of the George Cross for its sterling work during the pandemic, should be downgraded from 1st to 4th place in the pecking order of developed countries'  health services.

 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/aug/04/nhs-drops-from-first-to-fourth-among-rich-countries-healthcare-systems.  

The UK is now in  fourth place, ousted from the first by Norway, the Netherlands and Australia in that order.

The deterioration of the NHS is just one example of the general deterioration of public services in the UK, particularly over the last 11 years of Conservative rule as a result of  their ideal of lower taxation, a smaller state, public austerity and the silly mantra of "doing more with less," allied to the dogmatic belief that publicly provided goods and services are generally  expensive, wasteful and inefficient, while private sector provision  is lean, efficient and effective.

If anything should dispel this nonsense once and for all it is the experience of unfettered "free marketeering" in the efforts to combat the Covid pandemic: the expensive PPE procurement  via favoured friends and ineffective test and trace system compared  with the superbly efficient vaccination distribution provided by the public sector.

When the ideologically focused but unnecessary regime of public austerity was implemented  by the Tories  from  2010 the NHS was supposed to be protected from the cuts.    However, given the obvious consequences of the increasing longevity of the population (full disclosure: I am a happy beneficent and hope to be costing the NHS above the odds for years yet to come) and the development  of increasingly expensive  treatments, it does not take a super-brain to realise that the health service (not to mention the care service) needs financing above inflation in order even to stand still.

In spite of boastful announcements from the government about apparently vast lump sums this has not in fact been received.  The NHS has experienced cuts and thus did not have the spare capacity to continue dealing  with routine treatments when inundated with Covid cases.

(Again full disclosure: I had to wait 16 months for a routine procedure which would normally have been performed within about three weeks, and I feel jolly lucky to have had it and not still be waiting.)

I have quoted these figures before but they bear repeating.

From pages 223/4 of John Kampfner's "Why the Germans do it Better"* (Atlantic Books 2020)

At the start of the pandemic:

• Germany had 8.2 hospital beds per 1000 population, France 7.2, the UK 2.7
• Germany had 28 000 intensive care unit beds, the UK 4 100
• Germany had 4.1 doctors per 1 000 people, the EU average was 3.5  and the UK's 2.8
• Germany had 13.1 nurses per 1 000 population, the UK 8.2.

The problems of underfunding are not limited to health care.  Social care has already been mentioned.  Our schools, playgrounds, public parks, child-care services, street maintenance  and nearly all local government services are stripped to the bone.

 Our failure to contribute only peanuts to the healthcare services, particularly in regard to vaccination, of the rest of the world is shameful.  I have no means of confirming  this, but I was told that  when the G7 met for their discussions in Cornwall earlier this year  there were more people vaccinated against Covid in Cornwall itself than in the whole of Africa.

 We cannot have a modern functioning  civilised country with the services everyone, and not just  those who can afford to "go private" deserve, without paying for it.  

And we need political parties bold enough to say so.

*  Kampfner's book is very appropriately subtitled: "Notes from a Grown Up Country."  It sounds condescending I know, but I truly believe that the UK electorate needs to grow up and stop being taken in by the false prospectuses of  boastful politicians interested only in their own advancement.