Statement from Lewisham GP Dr Louise Irvine of the National Health Action Party on Jeremy Hunt’s announcement of a ‘managed breach’ in 18 week waiting times to deal with backlog of longer waiters: “This seems like a ploy dreamt up by Tory strategists to massage the waiting list figures in time for the election rather than a long term solution to the NHS funding problems . “The government was already barely keeping to the 18 week targets. This is just a public declaration that hospital waiting lists are spiralling out of control. More than 3 million people are on NHS waiting lists for first time in 6 years. “The issue here is that there has been an increase in demand for treatment in the NHS but no funding to maintain services to meet that demand, so waiting times are getting longer. Giving extra money as one-off payment while welcome is just a sticking plaster solution which will not deal with the underlying problem of the long term underfunding of the NHS and so the waiting times will increase again once this money has been spent. “The UK spends less on healthcare as a share of its GDP than all other G7 countries apart from Italy, which spends the same, and a recent Commonwealth Study which ranked the NHS as the best health care system in the world, revealed we spend the least of all the countries surveyed, other than New Zealand. Unless we have a properly funded NHS, these waiting time problems will continue.”
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 15:18:38 +0000
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