Investment, stopping privatisation, and improving pay for staff

It’s no exaggeration to say that the country is on its knees in 2024 after 14 years of a Conservative government which has starved our public services of funding and systematically undermined and devalued them.

The NHS today is haemorrhaging staff – doctors, nurses and midwives are leaving the service in record numbers either through relocation to friendlier countries, switching career paths or taking early retirement. You don’t have to look far for the reasons for this decline.

We have 125,000 vacancies in the healthcare sector alone. Understandably stress levels are high, morale is low and job satisfaction is poor. Nobody expects a bus driver to drive two buses at once, and yet that’s what NHS staff are expected to do every single day- to look after twice the number of patients that they can safely manage.

A staggering 11 million people are waiting for appointments to do with their health, very often for months. GP appointments are hard to come by with some areas reporting a 6-week wait to see a GP, and others only ever getting to see physician associates, and other allied health professionals, not an actual doctor due to a deliberate policy of diverting funds to these roles. The Covid pandemic certainly had a part to play in rising waiting times, but the fact is that the waits had been getting unbearable even prior to the pandemic.

As a nation, we spend about 20 to 30% less on our health service compared to France and Germany. We have fewer hospital beds, fewer doctors and fewer scans and other equipment.

Much of the ‘additional’ spend that this government claims to have put into the NHS in the last few years actually went to Test and Trace and PPE contracts, both of which were awarded in rather mysterious circumstances to companies, some of them friends and contacts of government ministers, rather than to NHS providers.

We’re not talking about small sums of money. This is billions of pounds of hard-earned taxpayers money that the government chose to give away through their so-called fast track route.

So while we got poorer as a nation, with an underfunded NHS, some people got very rich indeed.

Deliberate funding and starvation of the NHS have created an image in peoples’ minds that the NHS is a bottomless money-pit and beyond redemption. It’s a great pity that public perception has shifted this far and quite a few people now recite the mantra that privatisation is the only way to move forward. The fact is studies have shown that the NHS is an extremely efficient model of delivering healthcare to the population.

Of course it is not the only good model, but for the UK, it is the best one. So why is privatisation not the answer to the ills facing us?

Money given to the private sector simply deprives the NHS of funding and stops it from developing the infrastructure and the capacity that’s needed to resume a proper health service provision. The same money that Labour are proposing to give to private providers could be given to the NHS in the form of waiting list initiatives. There is no additional capacity or separate pool of doctors and nurses in the private sector.

Staff in the NHS are in desperate need of a pay increment to keep up with inflation and rising cost of living. I spoke to the Royal College of Nursing before the nurses went on strike last year. The stories they told me were harrowing. Nurses were buying subsidised food from the hospital canteen to take home to their children. They were using hospital laundry facilities to save bills at home. Many of them were using food banks.

Junior doctors start work on £15 an hour. These are bright dedicated young people who have spent at least six years studying a tough and demanding course, have racked up debts of £100k plus, cost the taxpayer another £500k in training costs, and who will be responsible for peoples’ lives from the day that they set foot in the hospital to start their first job.

Is it really too much to pay them £20 an hour when they start work? Why is it the government and the opposition find this demand unacceptable?

How long are we going to give healthcare workers claps and pats on the shoulder rather than money, recognition and a decent workload?

We have all the tools needed to rescue the NHS and put it back on its feet. The Green party will invest big sums of money in the health service – £20bn one-off capital funding, £20bn over the term of this parliament in improving wages, investing in primary care, better working conditions, better infrastructure, better mental health care. Not only because we love the NHS (we do!) but also because we understand that a healthy population is a happy and economically productive one.

We are in great need of NHS dentists right across the country. Dental deserts have sprung up everywhere and there are stories galore of people resorting to pulling out their own teeth. The current NHS dental contract is not fit for purpose and needs to be ripped up and rewritten so that NHS work becomes attractive again for dentists. There is no point in training more dentists if the contract they are required to work under doesn’t pay them adequately.

We would invest in public health in a big way, and ask them to draw up guidelines for indoor air quality in all indoor spaces to reduce the risk of transmission of airborne viruses.

What also needs to be mentioned is that we would invest in several measures that are not directly connected to health, but which will impact on health in a big way. Active travel opportunities, clean air measures (both indoors and outdoors), access to green spaces, availability of nutritious food and warm homes will all improve people’s health. As will better benefits, so that people don’t have to go without food, or shelter. Health gains from these wider determinants of health will be realised surprisingly quickly. For example the minimum unit price of alcohol in Scotland saw a drop in alcohol related deaths within 2 years of introduction.

The Green Party would do this and more. A vote for Green candidates informs the main two parties that you stand on the side of the NHS and our public services. Your vote counts, use it wisely.

Pallavi Devulapalli is the Green Party of England and Wales health spokesperson

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