The NHS is in a “critical condition” amid a widespread collapse in patient access to care, according to a landmark review.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed the NHS will now undergo unprecedented decade-long reform which he will dub the “biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth”. Lord Darzi’s report into the state of the health service, ordered by the new Government, found it had been “starved” of funding and hit by botched reforms during the Tory austerity years.
A&E queues more than doubled, crumbling hospital buildings were neglected and the nation’s health deteriorated as waits for treatment grew. Lord Darzi, a top surgeon and independent Peer, said: “Although I have worked for the NHS for more than 30 years I have been shocked by what I have found during this investigation – not just in the health service but in the state of the nation’s health.
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“We want to deliver high quality care for all but far too many people are waiting too long and in too many clinical areas quality of care has gone backwards. My colleagues in the NHS are working harder than ever but our productivity has fallen. We get caught up frantically trying to find beds that have been axed or using IT that is outdated or trying to work out how to get things done because operational processes are overwhelmed. It sucks the joy from our work – we became clinicians to help patients get better, not to go into battle with a broken system.”
The 160 page report was compiled in the first eight weeks of the new Labour government and examined 600 documents and pieces of analysis. It outlines how a collapse in capital spending on NHS buildings and equipment such as scanners has wrecked productivity. Overall annual spending rises in the last decade saw their slowest growth since the NHS was founded in 1948.
It said some areas of NHS care, such as heart health, have gone backwards for the first time in 50 years. It concluded that in every part of the NHS access has deteriorated just as the nation’s overall health has got worse.
Commenting in a speech this morning, PM Keir Starmer is expected to say the scale of the damage done to the NHS is “unforgivable”. He will say: “People have every right to be angry. It’s not just because the NHS is so personal to all of us – it’s because some of these failings are life and death.
“Take the waiting times in A&E. That’s not just a source of fear and anxiety. It’s leading to avoidable deaths. People’s loved ones who could have been saved. Doctors and nurses whose whole vocation is to save them – hampered from doing so. It’s devastating.”
The Darzi review also blames the hated 2012 Health and Social Care Act – spearheaded by then-Health Secretary Andrew Lansley – which it says caused “lasting damage”. They fragmented the NHS while ushering in the private sector and an era of “competition”, rather than collaboration, between NHS bodies.
Lord Darzi said: “In the last 15 years the NHS was hit by three shocks – austerity and starvation of investment, confusion caused by top-down reorganisation, and then the pandemic which came when resilience was at an all-time low. Two out of three of those shocks were choices made in Westminster.”
Mr Starmer will s describe the 2012 reform as “a calamity without international precedent”, adding: “Our NHS went into the pandemic in a much more fragile state. We had higher bed-occupancy rates, fewer doctors, fewer nurses and fewer beds than most other high income health systems in the world. The 2010s were a lost decade for our NHS…which left the NHS unable to be there for patients today, and totally unprepared for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.”
Lord Darzi, 64, got the nickname “Robo Doc” for spearheading keyhole surgery and robotics in operations. He was appointed as a health minister by Gordon Brown as an expert outsider into his “government of all the talents” and he served from 2007 to 2009.
The Conservatives have sought to use this connection to challenge the independence of his report. Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins has previously claimed the report is “cover for the Labour Party to raise our taxes in the budget in October”.