The News Line: Editorial
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
Death rate rising rapidly – savage Tory cuts to blame!
MASSIVE Tory cuts are undermining the NHS and threatening the lives of many thousands.
There is already an investigation taking place after whistleblower Sarah Hayes, a former senior call adviser for the NHS 111 helpline in the South West, said she had to speak out as there were ‘frequently’ no on-call clinicians in the call centre run by South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust, while ‘overworked’ paramedics and nurses fell asleep on their shifts.
Hayes worked at the same service as a call handler who was not medically trained enough to recognise that one-year-old William Mead, who died following a string of NHS failings, had sepsis caused by an underlying chest infection.
Hayes commented: ‘The service at the moment is unsafe, particularly for children and babies. I don’t want more children put at risk like William was.’ This is the price being paid for Tory NHS cuts!
Health Secretary Hunt has currently imposed a new contract onto the junior doctors, despite the fact that they have warned continually that this contract will make the NHS more unsafe for patients.
Their advice has been ignored by Hunt who is determined to speedily advance to a full privatisation of the NHS, whatever the cost to patient-care. Now health experts have warned that the death rate for 2015 is higher than at any time since the Second World War and that the crisis in elderly care has driven the fatality rate up by more than five per cent in one year!
The 528,340 deaths in 2015 were more than five per cent higher than the previous year – the highest annual rate since 1968. However, the experts warn that long-term trends suggest the rise could turn out to be the ‘greatest rise since the Second World War’.
When long-term factors are taken into account – such as the high rates of now elderly immigrants who arrived in the 1960s – the mortality rate could easily be on a par with the rate recorded in the 1940s.
Advisers to Public Health England (PHE) warn that the increase is a ‘strong and flashing amber warning light that something is making the population more vulnerable to avoidable death.’
That ‘something’ is of course the massive multi-billion cuts programme that the Tories are subjecting the NHS to – with a further £20bn plus of NHS cuts due this parliament! The elderly are now bearing the brunt of the growing crisis in the NHS with savage cuts to social care, and with women suffering the most.
Dominic Harrison, a professor at the University of Central Lancashire, has called for an urgent investigation and warned that the crisis in care of the elderly is causing the alarming rise in death rates.
He told the Health Service Journal: ‘One of the things this data may be telling us is it is just not possible . . . to contain costs, improve quality, reduce inequality and improve outcomes within such a rapidly diminishing resource envelope . . . we need to understand exactly what is happening if we are to prevent it continuing.’
Oxford University Professor Danny Dorling, who advises Public Health England on life expectancy, said: ‘When we look at 2015, we are not just looking at one bad year. We have seen excessive mortality – especially among women – since 2012.
‘I suspect the largest factor here is cuts to social services – to meals on wheels, to visits to the elderly. We have seen these changes during a period when the health service is in crisis, while social care services have been cut back.’
Very senior figures are saying that the fall in life expectancy among women in several parts of the country should be seen as a ‘canary in the mine’ because women are far more vulnerable to cuts in care as they live longer.
Tory cuts are costing thousands of lives, and the death toll will continue as long as they are in office and able to drive the project to privatise the NHS forward. The junior doctors have had two strikes to defend the NHS and stop the imposition of an anti-NHS contract.
A petition to remove Hunt reached 296,497 signatures yesterday. Hunt and the Tories are justifiably hated. However, they are still there and carrying on with their savage cuts.
The junior doctors must call another strike action, and this time demand that the whole of the BMA and all of the TUC trade unions, who depend on the NHS, come out with them to bring the Tories down and bring in a workers government and socialism. This is the only way to defend the NHS and to save thousands of lives!
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