Whose fault is the current NHS crisis? Today Jeremy Hunt apologised to patients whose operations have been cancelled as a result of serious pressures on hospitals. There are ‘major incidents’ at 16 hospital trusts, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is warning that patients who do end up in crowded and chaotic emergency departments ‘are much more likely to have a poorer outcome and even die as a result of their experience’.
The Health Secretary said the current situation was ‘absolutely not what I want’, while Theresa May argued that ‘the NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before’.
The government has not met Simon Stevens’ full demands for additional funding for the NHS, and emergency departments say they are in fact the worst prepared they’ve ever been for the winter. But it isn’t quite fair to say that this is all the fault of the people who’ve been making political decisions over the past few months.
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