Could the NHS meltdown lead to another Mid Staffs scandal?

Matilda played with her mother’s stethoscopes when she was a child. As a teenager, she pored over anatomy books. She devoted her early twenties to medical school and has been cramming for postgraduate exams well into her thirties. Last summer, she jacked it all in. Being a doctor ‘was turning me into a bad person,’ she explained to her nonplussed friends.

Many medics will recognise Matilda’s fear that her job was making her less caring, both to her patients and her family. The meltdown in the NHS is leaving doctors feeling even more burnt out than during the pandemic. The effect this is having on patients is frightening.

A common term in the medical world is ‘moral injury’, where workers feel the work they are having to do contradicts their own values. Talk to any emergency doctor, and they’ll say they are unable to provide what they would even consider the bare minimum standard of care to patients coming through their hospital doors.