BMA: Brexit “Breaking Point” for NHS

Brexit and funding cuts are pushing the NHS to “breaking point” according to Dr Mark Porter, the chairman of the British Medical Association.

Porter has used his fifth and final speech at the association’s annual conference to send a damning warning to Theresa May’s minority government that protecting funding and the rights of 30,000 NHS doctors from the EU are crucial if the health service is to continue functioning properly.

He told the conference in Bournemouth that the NHS is like an engine running on mere “fumes” after repeatedly receiving funding that is far lower than health spending in many leading European economies as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product.

The Government has passed the blame onto doctors whenever services have failed and its strategy for dealing with the NHS deficit was simply to “duck, dodge and pass it on,” Porter said.

Rather than having a stab solely at the Conservatives, Porter said the GDP share for the NHS would have fallen under all parties’ manifestos in the recent election. “If we spent the average GDP share then patients could see an extra £15 billion spent in five years,” he said.

“The Government wants a world-class NHS with a third-class settlement.”

Failing too many too often

“We still have one of the best in the world. It treats more patients than ever before and deploys treatments of which I could only have dreamed of when I first qualified as a doctor. But after years of under-investment with a growing and ageing population and despite the extraordinary dedication of its staff, it’s failing too many people too often,” he said.

That claim was reflected in BMA research released on June 26 that revealed 62% of the public believe the NHS will get worse over the next few years compared to just 39% two years ago. “For the first time in our polling more of the public are dissatisfied with the NHS than are satisfied.”

Throughout his speech Porter insisted that the combination of a critical lack of funding and politician’s claims of rising efficiency meant that ultimately hospitals are forced to consider money over care. He said that doctors receiving pay cuts are blackmailed with the choice of either taking the cut or seeing services close.

The research suggested that 41% of members of the public worried about the possibility that the NHS may cease to be free at the point of use and 35% fear an increase in waiting times.

Holiday Inn Efficiency

The NHS has lost more than 6000 beds in six years and the average bed occupancy between January and March was at 91% while some trusts had days when they ran out of beds. “This isn’t a measure of efficiency as it might be at the Holiday Inn. It’s a measure of how hospitals are choked as doctors try to move patients through their treatment pathway to the help they need,” said Porter.

He lamented the poor treatment available to mental health patients, with thousands of them “shuttled” around the country due to a lack of beds. One patient’s parents had to travel seven hours to see their son for just one hour each week.

Brexit

Many of the 10,000 NHS doctors who had qualified in Europe came to the UK as students “drawn by the values of the NHS and now embody those values but they’ve been left with fundamental doubts and worries about their rights and futures in this country,” Porter said. “We simply wouldn’t have a health service without them but 42% of EU-qualified doctors were thinking of leaving after the vote.

Closing down our borders would close down our health service.”

The BMA’s poll also showed nearly 70% of respondents felt the NHS’s problems would be upstaged and forgotten because of Brexit.

By Stewart Vickers @VickHellfire

 

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