Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
The A&E crisis is rapidly becoming the dominant story of the election. Last week, Ed Miliband and David Cameron laid into each other in blood-curdling terms. The Tory denounced as “disgusting” his rival’s plan to “weaponise” the NHS as a political issue; his Labour rival proclaimed that this was “a crisis on his watch, as a result of his decisions”.
Then, on Friday, Circle Healthcare announced that it was withdrawing from its contract to run Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire, the only privately managed NHS hospital in the country – shortly before the regulator announced that Hinchingbrooke was being placed in special measures.
The pressures on the system are certainly intense. Last month, I visited the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, one of the NHS’s flagships. I was there in A&E on the night that the hospital went to the highest alert level in its history, as the entire health system across the West Midlands basically collapsed in the face of unprecedented demand: ambulance services were overwhelmed, with patients left to bed down in A&E, some of them on trolleys parked in the corridors.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/n...a-tribute-to-the-health-services-success.html
Then, on Friday, Circle Healthcare announced that it was withdrawing from its contract to run Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire, the only privately managed NHS hospital in the country – shortly before the regulator announced that Hinchingbrooke was being placed in special measures.
The pressures on the system are certainly intense. Last month, I visited the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, one of the NHS’s flagships. I was there in A&E on the night that the hospital went to the highest alert level in its history, as the entire health system across the West Midlands basically collapsed in the face of unprecedented demand: ambulance services were overwhelmed, with patients left to bed down in A&E, some of them on trolleys parked in the corridors.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/n...a-tribute-to-the-health-services-success.html