Several medical organizations warned on Monday of a crisis affecting Britain’s emergency services, with many patients dying from inadequate or premature care, and urged the government to respond to this growing social discontent.
Britain’s free public health system, the NHS, has suffered more than a decade of severe austerity and the aftermath of an epidemic that has left it utterly depleted.
The crisis, which regularly makes British headlines, resurfaced on Sunday when the organization representing emergency staff, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, estimated that between 300 and 500 patients died each week in emergency departments due to a lack of service, especially in the long term. Waiting line. . .
Hospital officials did not dismiss the figures, but the vice-chancellor of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine defended the assessment on Monday.
“If you’re on the floor, you know it’s a long-term problem, not a short-term one,” Ian Higginson told the BBC on Monday, rejecting the hypothesis of temporary difficulties.
Last week, one in five patients taken by ambulance in England had to wait more than an hour to reach an emergency room. Tens of thousands of patients have had to wait more than 12 hours in the emergency department before receiving help.
The Government attributes the current situation to the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic and winter epidemics such as the flu, and confirms that it wants to make more efforts for hospitals, but has recently implemented a very strict budgetary savings policy.
Thus, the demand for a salary increase raised by the first nurses on strike in December was not met and inflation exceeded 10% for months.
The British Medical Association, the Carers Association, joined the alarm on Monday.
“It’s not right that the county has no way to fix this mess,” county chairman Phil Banfield said in a statement. “This is a political choice and patients are dying needlessly because of that choice,” he added.
He considered that the current situation “cannot continue”, and called on the authorities to take “immediate” measures.
In his New Year wishes, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak listed Britain’s health as one of his priorities, stressing that his government was taking “decisive” action to reduce disruptions to the public health system.
Source: EuroNews
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