Patrick Christys: The NHS is not a sacred cow

I think it’s time we started having a serious conversation about how people maybe at risk of getting seriously ill and possibly dying as a result of us locking down to ‘protect the NHS’ than from Covid itself.

Damning new figures show the number of people who've waited more than a year to start treatment has risen to 293,000 last month, which is almost three times as high as the same time last year when 83,000 had been on the list for this long.

And more than 1.7million people have been waiting more than 18 weeks for surgery.

And it gets worse. Apparently one in ten people in England are stuck on the NHS waiting list for routine operations.

Latest NHS data showed that 5.6million people across the country were waiting for elective surgery in July — the most since records began in 2007 — after the number rose continuously during the pandemic.

I find it astonishing then that the NHS is hiring 42 new executives on salaries of up to £270,000 — the irony is that a major part of their job description is to make sure the new £36billion health and social care tax is spent wisely.

Online job adverts reveal each executive will be paid an average of £223,261.

Seven jobs are advertised with salaries of £270,000, which is 80 per cent more than the Prime Minister earns. According to the job adverts, successful candidates will need to be 'politically astute' and 'actively champion diversity, inclusion, and equality of opportunity for all'.

What about healthcare? I can’t help but feel like the priority for our NHS right now is diversity and inclusivity instead of saving lives.

It’s an absolute scandal that our NHS can find the time to write a blog lecturing white people about how unconsciously racist they are, but they haven’t got the time to see patients in person.

Just Fifty-seven per cent of GP appointments are now in person, down from 80 per cent before the pandemic.

They should put a doctor’s receptionist in charge of the Channel because they’d never let anyone in, would they.

Either they say they haven’t got the time to see people in person, in which case, again, I would question why the NHS has the time to pump out woke drivel online. Or they can’t be bothered. Either way it’s not a great look.

The fact is that NHS big wigs always bang on about a lack of funding, well, we arguably couldn’t really be paying any more for our NHS than we are now. We’ve just hiked National Insurance, the Department of Health and Social Care is set to splash out 40 per cent of all government day-to-day spending from 2022.

I think this might be about as good as it gets in terms of NHS funding, and I think a lot of people out there are starting to wake up to the fact that the NHS isn’t beyond criticism, it’s not a sacred cow. When people see the eye-watering sums of money we’re now forking out every day for our health service, and they consider that they consented to a lockdown singularly to protect the NHS and then they also discover, despite all this, that GPs aren’t going into their own surgeries and if they want a routine operation they’ll probably have to pay for it themselves by going private – I think people start to ask the question, is our NHS actually fit for purpose?