The NHS is going to hell in a handcart: We are East Germany in N Ireland compared to West Germany in the south
We all know that the NHS in Northern Ireland is broken and getting worse. It’s difficult to get to see a GP, there are long waiting times in emergency departments and huge waiting lists for outpatients and operations which mean that people are suffering more and dying prematurely.
Why is it so bad, how do we fix it and when will it get better? But most importantly how do we as citizens here cope knowing that the health service cannot be relied upon at present. The NHS is worse than it has ever been with the lowest ever public satisfaction rating of 24%. It is under funded by 15% of needs and understaffed with below average number of doctors, nurses, CT and MRI scanners and the UK has closed half of its hospital beds in the last 30 years. As a result the system and its staff are overwhelmed – the waiting lists in Northern Ireland are the worst of the five countries in these islands. Compared to the Republic of Ireland, we have four times as many patients per capita waiting more than a year for an outpatient appointment and eleven times more waiting over one year for inpatient treatment. The funding in the Republic of Ireland for their health service, the Slaintecare programme means that they have more healthcare workers who are better paid and therefore able to keep their waiting lists shorter and their quality of care better. As a result the life expectancy for people in the south at 83 years on average is improving and is already longer than the United Kingdom and the USA. How do we fix this in Northern Ireland? Our first problem is that we are still part of the UK and while that continues, funding for the NHS will continue to be lower than that in the Republic of Ireland; we are East Germany here in N Ireland compared to their West Germany in the south . We have no prospect of getting enough funding to hire more staff to shorten the waiting lists and improve GP access. These problems will get worse and politicians and civil servants need to be honest with the public. We need to stop pretending that we have a free universal health service funded by taxation. It isn’t free if you can’t access it and it’s a long time since it was anything like universal. No one in the UK can or will fix the NHS in Northern Ireland or indeed in the rest of the UK. This isn’t the fault of the NHS staff who are having a dreadful time at the moment trying to do their best for their community. So we need to redefine what the NHS does and stop pretending because the only thing that is more dangerous than an absent service is a pretend service.
We all need to accept this challenge and redefine the NHS service. We need to recognise that we can no longer rely on the “universal” NHS and that things aren’t going to improve if we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. With this clarity we need, as a community, to look to our own resources and look after ourselves and our families.