Several doctors’ organizations warned on Monday of the crisis affecting emergency services in Britain, where many patients are “dying” from “not receiving adequate or timely treatment”, and called on the government to respond to this growing “resentment”. social .
Britain’s free public healthcare system, the NHS, has been suffering for more than 10 years of severe austerity and then the repercussions of the epidemic, which have left it completely exhausted.
And this crisis, which regularly makes headlines in British newspapers, resurfaced on Sunday, when the organization representing emergency personnel, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, estimated that between 300 and 500 patients die each week due to lack of care in emergency departments, especially long waiting lines.
Hospital officials have downplayed the numbers, but the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine defended the estimates on Monday. “If you’re in the field, you know this is a long-term problem, not a short-term one,” Ian Higginson told the BBC, dismissing the suggestion of temporary difficulties.
And last week, one in five patients transported by ambulance in England had to wait over an hour to enter the emergency room. Tens of thousands of patients have also been forced to wait more than 12 hours before receiving treatment in emergency departments.
The government attributes the current situation to the repercussions of the Covid-19 epidemic and winter epidemics such as flu, and confirms that it intends to make more efforts for hospitals, but has recently enacted a very strict budget saving policy.
Thus, the requests for increases presented by the nurses who carried out the first strike movement in December were rejected, while inflation exceeded 10 percent for months.
The British Medical Association, an association of carers, joined the alarm on Monday. “It is not true that the country does not have the means to fix this mess,” its president, Phil Banfield, said in a statement.
“It’s a political choice and patients die needlessly because of this choice,” he added.
He said the current situation “cannot continue”, calling for “immediate” action by the government.
In his New Year’s greetings, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak indicated that Britain’s healthcare system is one of his priorities, noting that his government is taking “decisive” steps to reduce backlogs in the public healthcare system.
