A senior NHS consultant is urging people to “beg, borrow or steal” to pay for private treatment because the health service is “on the brink of disaster”. “From a safety point of view, my department is stretched beyond capacity. The same is true for almost every A&E in the UK at almost any given time,” Dr Emma Jones warned.
Every day she saw evidence in her hospital and beyond that the whole NHS, not just accident and emergency, is at breaking point, she said. Analysis of the latest government figures suggests up to 500 people are dying every week in England because of the collapse of NHS emergency care.
Dr Jones, an experienced casualty consultant in a hospital in the Midlands, writing under a pseudonym for Unherd.com, warned of “Armageddon” when demand rises in the autumn, given the strain
departments are under in summer. “Even as a senior employee and stalwart supporter of the NHS, my advice to patients is this: forget it. Beg, borrow or steal to go private instead,” she wrote.
She said after 25 years of specialising in A&E treatment, she could testify that a decade of austerity had eroded “every structure” supporting the health service. Ambulances are held up from attending emergency cases because they are forced to wait for so long outside hospitals because of bed shortages.
Waits are so bad that last week one patient reportedly waited 40 hours for an ambulance and another 87-year-old man waited 15 hours on the ground outside in the rain. A million patients waited 12 hours in casualty between April last year and March this year, according to data from NHS Digital.
