Many hundreds more doctors could have signed the letter you published today, from doctors desperate to stem the decline of the National Health Service over the last five years under the coalition. People understandably may not be very interested in how the NHS is organised behind the scenes but they should know that the Tory/ Lib Dem coalition wasted eye-watering amounts of money on an ill-thought out and even less well understood re-organisation that set back the NHS many years. Far from cutting down on “bureaucracy”, the NHS now has a bewildering number of new bodies, with little clarity about who does what. There is little strategic planning and systems have become fragmented.
What is this to do with patients you might ask? Well, just one example: I and colleagues spent around 20 hours trying to find a scarce bed for a mentally ill and highly distressed I7 year old adolescent, languishing for many hours in an A&E department last week. There are too few beds for such unwell young people and where once we had some sort of system to facilitate an admission locally to those beds that did exist, now there is none. It is unconscionable.
Dr Jane Roberts