I thought we’d start the week with our old mate, Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás.
He said something that I thought was worth repeating.
We know him better as philosopher, George Santayana and for giving us the phrase;
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…’
… from his 1905 book, The Life of Reason. I suspect there will be more than a few PPE graduates who will know all about him.
It came to mind after a week of listening to exhausted NHS workers, on the airwaves, telling us how dreadful things are in the NHS and how 'they’ve never seen anything like it'.
They probably haven’t. I have. I have and I can tell you about the spike in flu cases, part of the problem we have today, in the winter of 1999-2000.
The NHS was predicted to collapse and almost ground to a complete halt. Thousands of people had their operations cancelled and at one point there were only two intensive care beds vacant in the whole of England.
Ambulances ferried really sick people around, to wherever there was a vacant bed.
Bed occupancy was over 90% and in some hospitals intensive care units were 100%. The numbers show bed occupancy and the numbers of patients was often more than one person to a bed. Such was the way the NHS counted things! It's different now.
Sidney Flu, as it was called, swung a wrecking-ball through the NHS and it prompted Tony Blair to launch a nation plan ‘to save the NHS’.
(By the way Keir Starmer, currently fiddling about with NHS 'reform', would do well to read this, and how Blair got waiting lists down to single figures.)
The National Library of Medicine reported
'... low uptake of influenza vaccine, a shortage of nurses, unrealistic expectations of patients, an already high occupancy rate for beds, and the unfortunate timing of outbreaks of both influenza and meningitis over the new year holiday brought the NHS to its knees last week.'
The Public Health Laboratory Service warned
... that vaccine uptake in 1996-7 was only 44% among elderly patients and only 12.4% among younger patients at risk… and there was a “clear need” to increase uptake, particularly among vulnerable people under 65, for 1999.
In subsequent years, leading up to the epidemic, there was a ‘flu awareness week’ and a third of a million more doses of flu-jabs were shoved into people’s arms.
Nevertheless, people died and one hospital stored bodies in refrigerated trailers.
If all this sounds familiar, it's because it is! Here are some more interesting factoids;
The general secretary of the day, at Royal College of Nursing, Christine Hancock, said: ‘It is nurse shortages that have led to this year’s crisis in the NHS. We cannot provide good patient care when we are short of some 12,000 nurses. A good pay rise would boost numbers immediately.’ She warned that even a 5% pay rise would not remedy the nursing shortage.
The NHS Confederation, (Now the Confed) said a survey last week of 267 healthcare trusts [Note, we don't have that many theses days] with acute beds showed that the most common reason cited for constraints in admitting patients to hospital was; pressure on beds, followed by difficulty recruiting and retaining nurses and staff illness and absenteeism…
… with bed occupancy at around 95% there is no margin at all for emergencies, and the question now being asked is, ‘Do we have enough beds?’
Nurses’ pay is an absolutely key issue but we don’t want to see a massive hike this year. [That was because they knew they’d have to fund it internally].
And…
The Health Select Committee, recommended; 'unification of health and social services… to end the confusion over continuing care for elderly and disabled people'.
If this all sounds familiar, it's because it is!
Here we are again. By George [Santayana], history is coming back to bite us.
The NHS is run at the behest of politicians. The NHS then runs behind them, trying to make sense of their decisions, neglect, ignorance and stupidity.
All of what we are experiencing now was foreseeable, avoidable and unnecessary.
We could have enough beds, enough staff, enough capacity and enough nouse to sort out the NHS social care problem… if we had enough elected representatives with enough brains.
Alas, more than enough people have died… because we don’t.
>> I'm hearing - the latest from Labour's Silly-Boy Streeting is; The NHS is often run in the interests of doctors rather than patients. Looking at the numbers, Labour will need a bigger swing, at the polls, to win the next election, than Blair achieved in 1997, so it is unlikely Streeting will ever be SoS health, which is just as well as, in my view, he lacks judgement and maturity.
>> I'm hearing - the Covid infection survey which tracks cases spreading across the UK could be shut down in the spring. Despite scientists urging the Government to avoid ‘flying blind’ by ending the survey which shows how many people in the UK are infected with the coronavirus.
>> I'm hearing - the Cambridge Children’s Hospital, project has been under discussion at Addenbrookes since at least 1984.
They have to raise £100m. Can they do it? Addenbrookes charity raises £8-10m pa. They are also working on a £3bn replacement for the whole hospital. That’s nearly the size of the national fantasy 40 hospital replacement programme. Maybe they should focus on their new Cancer Research Hospital.
