Full A&Es are the canary within the coalmine for the state of the NHS

A&Es are the canary in the coalmine for the state of the NHS.

When people cannot get the prompt NHS treatment they need to keep them well that is where they end up. So new data showing more people are turning up in A&E with minor ailments such as coughs and a blocked nose is showing us that all is not well in primary care.

People will understandably say you shouldn’t go to A&E with conditions like nasal congestion or a headache, but these figures may in come cases hide a more serious illness. However when people struggle to access a GP, dentist or community nurse health problems are not picked up early. This means people end up in hospital which is bad for the patient and more expensive for the NHS.

A decade-long funding squeeze has created a false economy within the NHS. As hospitals got busier they have sucked up a greater proportion of the NHS budget from primary care – hampering the NHS’s ability to keep people out of hospital and so increasing the need for more A&E funding.

Latest NHS England data for the first week of December showed hospitals had opened more beds at this time of year than ever before at 102,464, yet bed occupancy remained high, with 96,406 occupied.

NHS 111 fielded one of the highest number of calls for this time of year with 395,861 picked up by handlers, almost 10,000 more than last year.

It comes after the number of family doctors has fallen over the last decade despite repeated Tory promises to increase full-time-equivalent GPs to keep pace with population demand. In 2015 and 2019 the government promised 5,000 more GPs by 2020 and in 2019 Boris Johnson promised an additional 6,000 GPs by 2024 which didn’t materialise.

Crumbling hospitals and outdated equipment have also been blamed for poor productivity in the health service. The recent Darzi report identified this as the main reason a 20% increase in NHS funding in the last five years only increased the number of patients treated by 3%.

Lord Darzi concluded that cutting annual NHS funding increases from their historic average of 3.5% down to 1% during some years under Tory governments had resulted in the NHS being “starved” of the £37 billion in capital investment needed to modernise buildings and technology.

This meant leaving patients in vermin-infested Victorian wards and not enough equipment such as scanners so productivity plummeted. So when more money was spent to increase staff in the last few years the NHS struggled to increase the amount of patients treated.

Comparable European countries like France and Germany spend more on healthcare as a proportion of their GDP. They have more doctors and hospital beds per head of population.

With the NHS the old age is true – you get what you pay for.