As the curtain falls on the English National Theatre’s production of Nye, a timely and moving tribute to Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s failing National Health Service, the audience is reminded that, within years of its foundation, infant mortality declined by 50 per cent. Now the much-loved institution, once admired all over the world, is itself on its deathbed, a scathing report on the NHS in England warns, in “critical condition” following a decade of austerity politics and “starvation of investment”, a “calamity” of a Tory reorganisation in 2012, and the after-effects of Covid.
Like the creaking NHS, Ara Darzi’s government-commissioned report testifies, England’s own health is also going into reverse. Spiralling queues for treatment have left 8 per cent of the country on waiting lists that the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates may have resulted in as many as “268 additional deaths per week in 2023, or nearly 14,000 over the year”.
The review found England has spent some ¤44 billion less than peer countries on health assets and infrastructure since the 2010s, forcing the NHS to raid capital budgets to manage day-to- day spending. It is less and less able to do even the basics, with operations declining despite increased demand. Between 2019 and 2020, the number of knee replacements fell by 68 per cent. “No progress” had been made to improve early diagnosis of cancer, while cardiovascular disease rates were also “going in the wrong direction”.
A long-promised move towards increased community care has actually seen hospitals eating up greater shares of spending, while community-based nurses declined by 5 per cent between 2009 and 2023. Morale is shot.
Keir Starmer faces the biggest challenge of his new administration with a now all-too-familiar warning that it will all take time, promising a 10-year plan, and ominously warning the NHS would receive “no more money without reform”. It needs both, desperately.
All well and good, Nye’s ghost would say, but action will speak louder than words.