Several organizations of doctors warned on Monday about the crisis affecting emergency services in the United Kingdom, where they believe that many patients are dying due to lack of adequate or timely care, and called on the government to respond to growing social discontent.
Britain’s free public health service, the NHS, suffers from more than ten years of severe austerity and after the pandemic, which has left it completely depleted.
300 to 500 deaths per week
This crisis, which regularly makes headlines in the British media, was reignited on Sunday when the organization representing emergency workers, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, estimated that between 300 and 500 patients would die each week due to deficiencies in urgent care. including the endless waiting.
Those responsible for the hospital have put the credibility of these figures into perspective, but the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine defended this estimate on the BBC on Monday and rejected the hypothesis of temporary difficulties.
“If you’re on the pitch, you know it’s a long-term problem, not just a short-term one,” insisted Ian Higginson.
Last week, one in five patients seen by an ambulance in England took more than an hour to get to the emergency room. And tens of thousands of patients had to wait more than twelve hours before being seen in the emergency room.
“It’s a political choice”
The government questions the current situation regarding the consequences of Covid-19 and winter epidemics such as the flu, and claims to want to do more for the hospital, but recently launched a very strict budget savings policy.
Thus, it rejects the requests for increases requested, while inflation has exceeded 10% for months, by the nurses, who followed their first strike in December. The British Medical Association, a federation of caregivers, joined the alarmist statements on Monday.
“It is not true that the country does not have the means to fix this mess,” denounced its president Phil Banfield in a press release. “It’s a political choice and patients are dying unnecessarily because of this choice.”
He called the current situation “untenable” and called for “immediate” action from the government.
In his greetings, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cited the NHS among his priorities and said his government was taking “decisive” steps to reduce backlogs in the health service.
Source: BFM TV
