Meltdown: UK’s Government-Run Healthcare Service Faltering Under Crisis Conditions
. . .We’ve covered these impacts in countries like Canada and the UK previously, but a new Wall Street Journal report further spotlights a worsening healthcare crisis in the latter nation:
[Britain’s] state-funded service is falling apart. People who suffer heart attacks or strokes wait more than 1½ hours on average for an ambulance. Hospitals are so full they are turning patients away. A record 7.1 million people in England—more than one in 10 people—are stuck on waiting lists for nonemergency hospital treatment like hip replacements. The NHS on Monday faced the biggest strike in its history, with thousands of paramedics and nurses walking out over pay. The NHS’s woes are an extreme example of issues playing out across the developed world. Healthcare systems, hit hard by Covid, are under pressure as people live longer and have a wider range of treatment options. Aging populations mean costs will keep growing. The U.K.’s experience is a warning of what happens when supply in healthcare provision can’t keep up with demand.
The NHS has lost thousands of hospital beds in the past decade in its drive for efficiency. Covid delayed treatments for patients, resulting in a vast waiting list. Hospitals in England were already at 98% capacity in December when the brutal flu season began to take hold. The mass of sick patients gummed up the system to devastating effect. Delays in treating people are causing the premature deaths of 300 to 500 people a week, according to estimates from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a professional association in London. One in five British people were waiting for a medical appointment or treatment by the NHS in December, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS)…Fixing the service will take time, said NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard. The NHS said that over the next year it aims to cut the average time a heart attack sufferer waits for an ambulance to 30 minutes.
The targeted, aspirational improvement would be an ambulance waiting time of half an hour for someone having a heart attack. An estimated 300-500 excess/premature deaths per week under the foundering NHS, which the Brits treat as something of a national religion. (Read more from “Meltdown: UK’s Government-Run Healthcare Service Faltering Under Crisis Conditions” HERE)
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