The social care crisis is an emergency that cannot be ignored by politicians.

Call To Action

“…a delay in care is often a denial of care, and it is leading to enormous levels of suffering.”

The last few weeks have been truly terrible for NHS patients and staff. Terrible in a way that might be difficult to understand if you’ve never worked in the NHS, because when things become busy, the pressure is unrelenting. I stopped working in the NHS a long time ago now, but I can still recall that pressure like it was yesterday. The stress of continual bleeps and alarms, and the feeling of never being able to give enough. It feels like that pressure to deliver and the inability to ever feel like I could do enough is etched into my bones.

One of my early jobs as a doctor involved covering around 300 ward patients during on-call weekends. There were senior doctors elsewhere in the hospital, but almost never available; if you managed to get hold of them they were hurried and harried, pulled under by the responsibility of a thousand tasks themselves. It was a gruelling experience - trudging or running from place to place, trying to sort tasks into order of priority but being constantly interrupted by another crash bleep or nurse needing help, or patient falling, or an IV drip coming out of an arm or worse.

Back then, many years ago now, people generally thought that the NHS worked brilliantly, but the hospital in which I worked wasn’t brilliant, especially when things got busy during the winter. It was a place of unrelenting stress and pressure. I dread to think what is happening there today, because things in the NHS are so much worse now. Things must be much worse for the patients, much worse for the nurses and doctors, and much worse for the worried relatives. We’ve heard on the news for the past few weeks about the terrible situation in A&E departments; of patients receiving “corridor care” and even of people dying in hospital corridors because of a lack of space anywhere else. It doesn’t bear thinking about, and yet it must be thought about, because the only way we will change any of this is by forcing it into the spotlight, and using our collective indignation and intolerance of this horrible situation to force politicians into action.

The television crews have descended on A&Es and ambulance bays over the past few weeks, as they always do at times like this. They’ve gone to the emergency departments because it’s important to bear witness to what is going on, but we should be realistic and know that they’ve also been drawn to the A&Es because it makes good TV; it’s drama and human tragedy and flashing lights and action. And while they’re pointing their cameras at the scenes playing out at hospital doors, there’s another situation that is quietly affecting millions of people and contributing to the NHS crisis enormously, and yet it definitely isn’t being spoken about enough right now....