The NHS is failing us, but we are failing it too

In October, Kit Yates and I wrote about how the NHS was facing its bleakest midwinter.1 We highlighted how things were bleak and getting worse across the board, from emergency care, to secondary care, to primary care. Two months later and the situation has continued to worsen. Amid record waiting lists and full hospitals, there are rapidly rising covid hospital admissions and—for the first time in three years—rapidly rising hospital admissions for flu.23 A recent large wave of RSV also added pressure and is only now declining.2Emergency care is grinding to a halt. Ambulance handover delays are getting ever longer. Pre pandemic the percentage of handovers taking longer than an hour (the target is 15 minutes) rarely rose above 5%. During the worst of the pandemic in January 2021, the percentage rose to 7%. Since the summer of 2021, emergency care has been increasingly stretched and as of this week…
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