As an NHS palliative care doctor, it’s my #publicduty to inform the public that 9 years of brutal underfunding have run the NHS into the ground. We want to care for you brilliantly but we are at breaking point. The NHS won’t survive another 5 years of this.
#GeneralElection2019
#GeneralElection2019
A few examples from the NHS frontline. When I qualified in 2009 nobody lay on a trolley in an ED corridor in my hospital. Nobody. Now it’s routine. Every winter. With ambulances queuing round the block. With staff & patients equally desperate. In the world’s 6th richest country.
Now I meet patients in agony, in sheer desperation, who have waited well over a *year* for a simple hip replacement. Some are trapped inside by their pain. Some fall, inevitably, and fracture that hip. 9 years ago? You’d have your surgery in weeks. The contrast is diabolical.
Now some parts of the UK ration cataract operations so the patient has to be virtually *blind* before NHS surgery is allowed. Blind. I meet patients whose only income is their state pension who have spent their *entire* life savings on cataract surgery. It makes my blood boil.
Now patients have their vital cancer operations postponed once, twice, even three times because there are no ITU beds for them to recover in afterwards. A travesty of good care, causing fear, anguish and potential reduced chances of cure.
The Tories’ track record on the NHS is 9 years of wilful, calculated, deliberate destruction. Talk is cheap. It’s actions that count. I practice evidence-based medicine and the evidence here couldn’t be clearer. They’re destroying by stealth our precious NHS. #GeneralElection2019
