Kind Words won’t fix a terminally ill NHS

By Liz Hunt, Daily Telegraph 30 Dec 2006

Ten years after Tony Blair claimed there were only 24 hours to save it, and following billions of extra investment (from £34 billion in 1997 to £81 billion this year), the system that we see lurching from crisis to crisis is surely teetering on the brink.

Across England and Wales, hospitals are struggling to balance budgets by shedding jobs and shutting wards. At the same time, morale among staff, the health service's most precious resource, is rock bottom. Restructuring of training – Modernising of Medical Careers – was initially welcomed, but has been badly implemented. It could result in as many as 11,500 junior doctors being out of work or in dead-end jobs. Despite a national shortage of physiotherapists, 90 per cent of graduates couldn't get a post this year. Half of the newly qualified nurses, four out of 10 radiographers, eight out of 10 new speech and language therapists and two thirds of midwifery graduates are in the same boat. And all this after the Government invested heavily in training and increased recruitment.

Then again, the hallmark of New Labour is incompetence, waste and short-termism, and nowhere is that more evident at the end of 2006 than in the NHS.