NHS: Day of Action 14/04/18

Tomorrow in Leeds people will be gathering from all over Yorkshire (and beyond) to march in protest at the treatment our NHS is suffering under this Tory government and their persistent ideology of austerity.

Details of the Facebook event can be found here.

It is not going to be easy for the next Labour government to fix the mess that the Tories are making. Here’s an idea of the problems the NHS is facing:

1. Cuts to community health schemes place more pressure on A&E
2. Cuts to mental health schemes place more pressure on A&E
3. Cuts to respite care mean that vital bed space is taken up
4. The Tories blame the junior doctors and try to make them work longer hours
5. NHS contracts are given to private companies where profits go to shareholders and not back into NHS coffers (private companies are basically making profit from our taxes).
6. The Tories bring about the Brexit referendum and now EU doctors and nurses are returning to their home countries in their droves
7. The Tories scrapped the nurses’ bursary meaning it costs a fortune to train and isn’t sustainable for a large number of people
8. The Tories put in place the public sector pay cap and then remove it by granting a below rate of inflation pay rise

While all this is happening to the departments and people that work there, the whole work environment suffers leading more people to want to leave their NHS job. The Tories do not like the NHS, it is a daily reminder of the power of socialism and the greatest achievement of the Labour Party – forget that it is deeply loved by the vast majority of the population.

So what do the Tories do? They make it look like it is failing, they attack it from every angle, you might call it “death from a thousand cuts”. They then point out that it’s failing but remind us that they’re putting more money in than ever. All the while forgetting that the price of everything goes up and that they aren’t keeping up with inflation resulting in a real terms cut to the NHS budget – year on year.

We’ve had enough – meet at 11:30am tomorrow morning (Saturday 14th April 2018) outside the Leeds Art Gallery – let’s show the Tories that we, the people, want our NHS!

An easy way to see how the NHS is coping is to see how well A&E departments are managing to treat people within the ascribed 4 hour limit. Here we have collated data which shows the percentage of patients seen in four hours or less at major A&E departments in the first quarter of each year, you’ll note that the figures start diving in 2010 proving only one thing – the Tories do not care for our NHS:

The data for the graph is as follows, what will it look like in 2020 if nothing changes? In December 2017 there were 2.016 million attendances at A&E across the country. Using the figure of 76.8% released in under 4 hours from the 1st quarter of 2018 and applying it to the December 2017 figure – that would mean that 467,712 would be in the system for longer than 4 hours over the period of just 1 month, thus placing even more strain on our burdened system, we have to do something: