Is the NHS a charity?
Our government may well try to have us believe this is the case in the not too distant future.
An example of an image result from a Google search for "negative NHS headlines".
When the NHS became the centre of the British universe due to the effect of ten years of austerity inflicted by the governments and secretary of states in that time, it was reported to be on its knees and on the brink of collapse due to underfunding and understaffing. Anyone who worked within the NHS would openly criticise the way things were being run. There was talk of A&E services being cut down or removed in some areas. There was talk of not enough money to fund the newest medications that had proven to be so successful in trials.
Then covid-19 happened. The media forgot about the years of underfunding, the staff retention and recruitment crisis, the alleged plans to privatise the NHS (as was the scaremongering of the election in December 2019). Gone were these negative stories that pitted the survival of the NHS against the prime minister and his government widely charged with ignorance, capitalist ideologies and tunnel vision when it came to how most of us live and survive in this country. It must be noted that these pre-covid headlines were rarely printed in the hope that the government would see the error of their ways. They didn't support the NHS, they just reported the latest grumblings from within. They didn't implore the government strongly enough to avoid heading towards a private healthcare system that the masses wouldn't be able to afford to benefit from, à la USA. It was very much a softly softly approach, almost to say "we've informed the public this is the state of play, we can do no more."
If anything, the blame was deflected to the general public for overrunning the service in the first place. Abusing the services and causing a shortfall in funding as a result. While there will have been people abusing the system, taking from it everything they could and not using services responsibly (A&E for a paper cut would be one exaggeration that someone will allegedly have done), these people will have been a drop in the ocean in terms of draining of finances. The biggest hit had to have been the lack of investment and funding for services.
An example of an image result in a Google search for "coronavirus NHS headlines".
The stories in the media have all been about PPE, ventilators and testing. All of which are severely lacking in many areas, apparently. PPE and testing are the sore points that are continuing to dominate the media stories and the questions posed by journalists at the daily briefings. There was outcry about ventilators early on, and even though not enough were purchased or manufactured (in spite of Boris' call to British industry to assist in the "war") the government was lucky that the apparent demand for ventilators did not exceed capacity in the end and so, thankfully, everyone who needed access to a ventilator had it. But it looked like it may have been a lottery at one point. Health services have long been renowned for working with a postcode lottery, and the supply of ventilators looked to be another star prize of that lottery. We are fortunate that it appears to not have been the case, yet there is still a small part of me that questions whether this is as straightforward as has been presented.
If we had the capacity to dig deeper, I wonder if we'd find that hospitals in particular areas of the country seeing huge increases in demand were in fact being force to play a lottery with patient treatment. Just because total numbers for the whole country show that demand hasn't exceeded capacity, it in no way confirms that individual hospitals or NHS trusts were not overwhelmed at any point. Maybe this information is what will surface during the calm after the storm. Will the media then cause an uproar on behalf of the public it is designed to speak for and incessantly question why these failings were not admitted to at the time? Highly unlikely if the behaviour of the media and the government throughout this crisis is anything to go by.
Then suddenly we had heroes popping up everywhere, raising money for "the NHS". While I am all for fundraising support to allow NHS services to be continued, fundamentally, any fundraising should be enhancing what is the minimum humane level of service already funded by central government. It should not be in place of it.
Don't get me wrong, I have not seen any official media channels suggest anywhere that this is the case. Unfortunately I am a pessimist when it comes to the ambitions of this government, I have no faith in anything they tell us for the most part. I am forced to accept it as truth because that is what they are telling us but I can't totally trust what is said until the proposal is a reality. That reality has rarely come to fruition in a positive way in the past ten years. At least not in my view.
Back to the fundraising heroes. A 100 year old war veteran raised over £30million in total to support the NHS. The worrying thing is that amount of money probably doesn't scratch the surface of what the NHS actually needs to run an efficient programme. But it's £30million that should already be in the coffers of the NHS, having been handed over from government. The achievements of Captain Tom Moore are incredible given that he is at a point in his life where he should be reaping the rewards of his contributions to British life, not still contributing to it. There are others who have announced their own challenges having been inspired by him. Connections on social media have done some fundraising in aid of the NHS Charities Together, a feature that facebook in particular allows us to do now. I am assuming that all money raised in this vein is going to NHS Charities Together, more in the hope that the government doesn't get its sticky mitts on it than anything. But what if something has been paid forward directly to the NHS?
This is where I have an issue with the whole fundraising idea. The NHS was designed to be a publicly funded service, free to all at the point of use. As a nation we are proud of this service, yet my belief is that we don't have enough compassion for it any more. We are quick to criticise it when it falls short of expectations. We don't appreciate the politics at play that are a large factor in how the expectations are not met. Sadly, this is an element we cannot change if we are to continue having the NHS as a public service. If we remove the political element from it, we remove the taxpayer and government sourced funding. Then it becomes a private not-for-profit enterprise that will only survive if it is, at bare minimum, breaking even due to the amount of staffing and resource costs that it incurs. Racking up deficits of the size that have recently been written off during this crisis (as a government response) would see the whole thing collapse - in a short to medium term timespan, I believe. Although there is real potential that the NHS could genuinely function as a charity if the government control was removed, there is one big question: would enough money be raised through charitable donations to sustain the level of service (and everything that is presumed in providing that service) that we are accustomed to?
The health secretary took immense pleasure when he announced that deficits for every NHS trust in England were being written off. Yet where was his apology for the chronic underfunding of this and previous governments that created those deficits in the first place? Those trusts now starting "from zero" have been given a financial break to a certain extent, but it's my guess that post-covid, when the dust settles, the rumblings of underfunding and understaffing will start to surface all over again. I just hope that the public won't sit back and let it happen next time.
Be kind. Stay safe.
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