The NHS is suffocating under huge pressure. Even the regulator of the UK’s doctors, the General Medical Council – which is not normally known for speaking out – has offered with stark words. The NHS is struggling to cope with the demand placed on it, the GMC says. The “growing number of people with multiple, complex, long term needs” who needed treatment at a time of “severely constrained funding” was made “significantly worse by the fragility of social care services”. This is exactly right. The NHS is doing more, with less, with the added pressure of the financial and bureaucratic costs of service fragmentation under the Health and Social Care Act 2012.
The junior doctor strikes were ostensibly about a new contract, which has now been imposed. But the unrest in the medical profession was and is not confined to that one issue. Doctors are also concerned about Jeremy Hunt’s repeated use of misleading statistics about weekend death rates, continuing even after he had been corrected; and his claims that medicine had turned into a 9 to 5 job, which meant he wanted a “sense of vocation and professionalism brought back into the contract”.
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