The heads of almost every Emergency Department (ED) are “very” or “extremely” concerned over the additional pressure winter will put on the North’s healthcare system. Those who run our hospitals day in and day out are blaring the warning sirens. Stormont’s response? To sail merrily along straight towards the iceberg ahead!
But fear not, “the Health Minister has stated his commitment to reduce waiting times” explained a Department of Health spokesperson. Well, that’s alright then! As long as he’s committed, surely there can’t be anything to worry about?
In July, just before his resignation, then Health Minister Mike Nesbitt announced a paltry £80 million boost to try to improve waiting times and healthcare services. He used the same old and tired lines about the need for “better use of clinics, diagnostics, and elective care facilities”. The NHS must become ‘more efficient’, with the Health Minister promising to “ensure every pound of this investment delivers tangible benefits”.
When there is not enough money in the budget to properly fund the NHS, all Stormont can do is stretch every pound for all its worth. The reality is that improving these essential services will cost far more than £80 million, even just to bring the North on par with the rest of the UK – let alone have a well-functioning NHS. The warnings from ED chiefs make this point very clear.
And when it comes to so-called ‘efficiency’ – of all Stormont’s attempts at ‘improved efficiency’ there is no better example than the Health Department’s new policy of Release to Rescue.
The policy, brought in just five months ago, was intended to reduce the length of time patients wait inside ambulances, before being admitted to EDs. On the surface this sounds reasonable, in the North the number of ambulance handovers over 3 hours has increased from 1 percent in 2019 to 9 percent in 2024.
But this new policy did nothing to address the underlying problem: patients remain stranded in ambulances because hospitals in the North lack sufficient capacity. While the Release to Rescue policy has reduced ambulance handover times by 30 minutes, patients are now waiting in overcrowded hallways instead! The Health Department ‘efficiency’ plans have just shifted the burden from one place to another.
For all the nice rhetoric coming from Stormont, we can see for ourselves that the NHS is crumbling while the political establishment has absolutely no solution to this crisis. Yet the wealth needed to properly fund the NHS already exists in society. Indeed, the Stormont politicians were quick to find the money when it came to their 27 percent pay rise!
Banks, financial institutions and multinationals in the North have a tremendous amount of wealth already. That wealth must be seized by the working class and youth to be redistributed towards the needs of the majority rather than the greed of the minority.
Why should we be the ones forced to pay for a crumbling NHS which has to count every pound spent when we know the wealth to fund our healthcare already exists? Why should we allow a dysfunctional Stormont to make the decisions instead of the workers themselves?
