Reader’s Letter

Having had my first experience in attending an A&E in a UK hospital on Saturday (an aged friend who was staying with me took a turn for the worse) I came to the conclusion that this aspect of the NHS is at creaking point. We were there for nearly seven hours before she was discharged and during the entire time the place was bursting at the seams. This wasn’t even on a Saturday night but during the day and when I thanked the members of staff for the way they were trying to cope under such stressful conditions the shared response was that I hadn’t seen anything yet as the Saturday night rush hadn’t even begun by the time we were leaving at 6.30pm.

Despite what the left might claim it stands to reason that resources like the NHS are in the front line when it comes to a government policy that has encouraged unsustainable levels of official and unofficial immigration over the past thirty years or so. There’s obvious other reasons why the NHS is struggling but it’s dishonest to deny that immigration hasn’t contributed to it.

In the context of this NHS predicament it’s interesting to compare the needs of the NHS and the pattern of government spending on its Ukraine adventure.

I’ve checked and it costs between £350- £600 million to build and equip a medium-sized hospital (typically 100-200 beds).

So far the UK has committed over £25 billion pounds to Ukraine.

Of course, running a health service costs more than the costs of the bricks and mortar and machinery with staff running costs being the biggest ongoing costs. And even if the money now being provided to Ukraine was to be diverted to the NHS it would still require the presence of a highly skilled workforce to operate it.

Where are those people to come from? We hear a lot about them having to be brought in from abroad and how the NHS would collapse without this contingent among the staff. However, my experience at Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary on Saturday was that the vast majority of the staff, at least in the A&E department, were not immigrants. While filling in the time while I waited on my friend to go through the various tests I calculated that about 80% were not immigrants. This was similar to to the names listed on the cardiac white board for staff rotas in the cardiac unit behind the processing area.

So it seems to me that there are many individuals out there who are willing to undertake the arduous work at the NHS coal-face. However, they need to be offered proper training opportunities as well as the prospect of being adequately rewarded at the end if the promise of those people is to be realised.

For too long successive governments have relied on importing pre-trained medical and nursing staff from abroad as a cheap way of sustaining the NHS. The direction of that policy has tended to prevent the development of a proper domestically orientated training programme that is dovetailed with a generous remuneration schedule. It struck me that this is an area where the £25 billion spent on Ukraine would better serve the British people.