Crisis point – The State of the NHS

The BBC has reported that the NHS is at a crisis, with hospitals running out of beds and patients being left on trolleys for hours.

Chris Hopson, of NHS Providers, said hospitals were unsafe and over-crowded.

This raises questions of funding and longer term plans to help the NHS in a time of crisis.

Politicians have rebuked these concerns by claiming that there are concrete plans in place to ensure that the health service will rectify any issues that are currently present and can cope in the future. 

However, mounting evidence highlighting severe problems has put pressure on both politicians and NHS officials to provide more clarity on the current status of the NHS and initiatives to combat such problems. Last year, the NHS missed several targets for A&E, cancer and planned operations across the UK. There is evidence to suggest that illnesses like the flu are rising, meaning that the lack of hospital beds will become more of a growing issue in the upcoming future.

Since 2010 the budget has been rising at about 1% a year on average, whereas traditionally the NHS got over 4%. Students wanting to study Economics should look into the causes and consequences of this percentage decrease.

Students that want to study Medicine should think about how important public opinion is to the effective running of the NHS. Furthermore, students may want to think about the growing obstacles facing doctors in a professional capacity and how this could affect the incentive to study to become a doctor.

Students that want to study HSPS should look into how the media’s representation of public bodies can infiltrate public opinion, and in extension affect voter choice. They should also start to assess how effectively these concerns are being dealt with by politicians.