NHS: Brexit Poses a Major Crisis to Healthcare

A hard Brexit poses a “substantial and real threat to healthcare” according to a health policy adviser to the House of Commons who says patients could be put at immediate risk.

“We haven’t got slack in the NHS,” said Nick Fahy, a leading researcher at the University of Oxford. “We’re not coming at this from a position of strength but from a position where each winter we breathe a sigh of relief that we managed to make it through without the NHS collapsing and that doesn’t give us a situation of reserves we can draw on,” he told BBC News.

While attention has focussed on London’s reliance on European-trained health workers the impact of Brexit could ultimately be even more damaging to areas such as Wales according to Fahy, a specialist adviser to the House of Commons health committee, the Department of Health and the European Commission.

Even in Wales

Just 2% of NHS staff in Wales are from the EU but Fahey warned that London hospitals’ dependence on European staff could have knock-on effects throughout the nation because wages and “London allowances” in the capital could rise if the free movement of labour ends due to a hard Brexit The loss of workers from the EU would mean an exodus from Wales as staff flocked to take the better wages offered to fill the inevitable shortages in London.

Carol Shillabeer, chief executive of the Powys health board, warned that the problem goes beyond hospitals and into social care services, where shortages have already caused the NHS’s critical lack of beds by filling hospitals with medically-fit patients who are unable to look after themselves.

“If we reel forward to what could happen without that workforce we start to think about sustainability of the social care sector and particularly residential homes and the availability of surgeons,” she said. “You start to see the workforce eroded even further.”

Self Destruction?

Some 52.5% of voters in Wales chose to leave the EU along with majorities in 17 of the 22 Welsh council areas, many of which have traditionally supported Labour.

Just the five areas of Gwynedd, Cardiff, Ceredigion, the Vale of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire had majority support for Remain. Post-election surveys suggest the result in Wales was heavily influenced by a sense that its problems had been neglected by Westminster but local authorities are anxious that Wales receives £680m of EU funds every year.

That includes urban development and structural funds helping to support people into work and training.

The Common Agricultural Policy pays £200m a year to 16,000 farms in Wales “to help protect and enhance the countryside.” Meanwhile there are serious doubts about the future of the Welsh Government’s rural communities development programme, which is investing £957m in supporting rural businesses over six years to 2020.

The Government may use targeted pay to give certain groups of NHS staff larger rises than others to tackle shortages in areas like nursing, according to reports last month. Staff in London where the NHS is struggling to fill 13,000 nursing vacancies would be the top priority due to its high cost of living.

Fahy’s suggestion that the Government may be forced to offer a London “Brexit dividend” for NHS workers is gaining support along health planners. Staff shortages will only get worse with Brexit and more cash will be needed to plug the gaps in the short term. It is the still-neglected regions that will ultimately suffer as the consequences roll out across the nation.

by Stewart Vickers

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