How to fix the NHS

That the NHS is in intensive care appears to be beyond doubt. The health service in England needs 12,000 doctors and 50,000 nurses and midwives, and waiting lists are expected to rise to 9.2 million by March 2024. The question now is what to do.

It’s a question that has been asked before, and the answers have been poor. One more heave at reform, a task force here, a task force there, another few billion all over the place and all will be well, so the defenders of the NHS claim. What they overlook, however, is that there have been more than a dozen major reform programmes over the past 30 years, yet our health outcomes remain dismal. Some 50,000 people die a year in the UK from ‘treatable mortality’ (that is, when patients receive sub-standard care) – comparable to the 145,000 excess deaths in the first two years of the pandemic.