Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul
People have been complaining about NHS funding for as long as I can remember, even way back in the 1990's, under Labour and Conservative (and coalitions).
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Because we've underfunded it for years compared to other similar countries:
https://www.ft.com/content/f752a1ad-...9-4909974c6a2c
Quote:
The UK has spent about 20 per cent less per person on health each year than similar European countries over the past decade, according to new research that shows how the NHS has been consistently starved of funding.
The data from the Health Foundation, which was shared with the Financial Times, found that health spending in the UK would have needed to rise by an average of £40bn per year in the past decade to match per capita health spending across 14 EU countries.
In the decade before the pandemic the UK spent on average around a fifth less on day-to-day health costs than the major EU countries studied. During the Covid crisis, spending increased by 14 per cent compared with the EU14 average of just below 6 per cent. However, this high level of spending had been needed to compensate for years of attrition in the run-up to the crisis, Charlesworth said.
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It's not a surprise that with that underinvestment we're also seeing much longer waiting lists since 2010:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-60305502
And again this started
before COVID hit. COVID made it worse for sure both the virus itself and the subsequent delayed treatment from the year lost but when you run a health service that can't meet the demand it already had, there is no capacity at all to deal with a crisis.
Look at that BBC article about cancer waiting times. The number of people urgently seen for cancer has dropped from 90% in 2010 to 80% by 2017 and now 70%!
The NHS has got measurably worse. I don't know why we're just accepting such declines.