Before you give too much credit to Dan Poulter (MP & doctor) for abandoning the Tories to join Labour, don't forget he's been an MP for 14 years & been working as a doctor all that time.... so one might have expected him to notice the Tory engineered crisis in the NHS quite some time before now.
No, he's defecting because he can see the Tory electoral meltdown coming & wants to preserve his happy position of having two well-paying jobs.
In a pattern that is repeated across a range of recent (and not so recent) political policy scandals, it seems the Govt. of the day was warned that blood products from the USA should be assumed to be virus-laden.... but lacking 'conclusive proof' the Govt. did nothing other than pass on the plasma, with devastating & fatal consequences.
Each scandal has its own Cassandra's warning but being ignored... its become a national trait.
To be clear, I don't blame the nurses & doctors in A&E who are encountering budget & capacity pressures that would make it difficult for anyone to do a good job.
As length of waiting times in A&E grow, so do deaths while waiting to be seen; but this is part of the crisis engineered by the Tories, not a managerial or staff training issue (which is not to say these have no impact).
@ChrisMayLA6
There's nothing wrong with the #NHS that undoing 15 years of #Tory#austerity won't fix. Just look at wait time and satisfaction data from 2009.
It's not the NHS model that's the problem, it's the #Tories
The state of the NHS is a key issue for voters. On May 2010, the median waiting time for patients on the NHS was 5.5 weeks. The median as of February this year was 14.8.
The Tories, who have more seats than Labour overall, hold 59 seats in the 20 NHS areas with the worst waiting times, compared with Labour’s 33 seats.
Oh dear.. #NHS#WaitingLists#GeneralElection#UKPolitics
Rishi Sunak exposed over NHS queues as Tory seats among UK’s worst areas https://archive.is/SIU4Z
Waiting times for NHS gender clinics continue to grow. A trans person attending their first appointment in England or Scotland today will have waited between 2 and 7 years.
“A doctor, arrested and jailed for her involvement in Just Stop Oil protests, has had her medical licence suspended for five months
(…)Doctors' Association UK said: "This is a story of a clinician being punished for raising serious concerns about dangerous inaction on the greatest threat to global health we have ever, or will ever
experience”
“The British Medical Association (BMA) has said it is "very concerned" by a tribunal's finding that a doctor's participation in Just Stop Oil protests amounted to professional misconduct
… She said: [BMA] "Climate change has been declared the biggest potential health crisis in the world by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
Hmmm... so Doctors are over-burdened & their working lives need to be improved. But cutting the requirements for mandatory additional in-career training seems an odd area to focus on.
Odd, that is, unless you start from the position that it will be impossible to expand the number of doctors in the mid-term & so easing off their hours cannot come from increasing the workforce.
This looks like NHS England trying to make the best of an impossible situation.
"Of the 850,000 people who are long-term sick, fully half say they have depression or anxiety," said Sunak in such a manner today that these were not real illnesses.
....
"It would be wrong to sit back and accept this growing trend."
JFC, the #UK is so desperate for a #GeneralElection which must be called in the next 6 months ... But not before the #Tories make one more attack to damage the #NHS
I don't but one of our sons works for the NHS in Manchester.
Meanwhile Wes Streeting has taken £175,000 from donors with links to private health firms since January 2023. Labour will come for the SNHS given half a chance.
#ClimateDiary It seems, IS, utterly crazy, that amidst everything else the UK government is ruthlessly continuing its clampdown on climate protesters. But it is.
Excellent article by Natasha Walter here on how Dr Sarah Benn got 30 days in prison for holding up a placard saying “Stop New Oil” and overall recent developments:
“the direction of travel is fast and frightening and its repercussions are growing.”
#ClimateDiary and now Dr Benn has also been found guilty of professional msiconduct, by a Medical Practitioners Tribunal. This is deeply wrong. Holding up a sign and protesting - for planetary, human health! - does not constitute medical misconduct. I hope many #doctors will speak up against this. #NHS#JustStopOil#ExtinctionRebellion
I’m looking at the reports that #starmer#labour#ScottishLabour are going to commit to replacing Trident. An obscene amount of money so that Starmer can sit with the ‘big boys’ at the nuclear table. #jackiebmsp must be proud and salivating at the thought of retaining her seat at the expense of the #nhs and #socialcare. #scottishindependence now!