NHS plans fail to address a system in crisis

The government’s plan to get the NHS through this winter offers virtually nothing of substance and shows that ministers are in denial about the scale of the crisis. In her first big announcement as England’s health and social care secretary, Thérèse Coffey unveiled Our Plan for Patients.1 Having promised in the opening lines of the document that “we will not paper over the problems that we face,” she spends much of the following 4000 words doing precisely that.The overwhelming pressures on services such as ambulances, emergency departments, and primary care are presented as the unfortunate side effects of poor performance and bureaucratic barriers such as too few phone lines for GP surgeries and too little data sharing between ambulance trusts. At no point does Coffey reference the fundamental problem that there are too few staff to meet the high and growing demand from an ageing population.One of the few solid…
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