Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, must act decisively on the key challenges facing the NHS and social care or face an “uncontrollable crisis” this winter, doctors’ leaders have warned.Truss became the fourth Conservative prime minister in six years after gaining 81 326 votes (57.4%) of Conservative party members, defeating her rival, Rishi Sunak.The most pressing item in Truss’s in-tray will be tackling soaring energy bills that will have severe health implications if people, particularly if they are elderly or clinically vulnerable, are forced to choose between food and heating.During the leadership contest the NHS received relatively little attention, but in her victory acceptance speech Truss pledged to “deliver on the …
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Yes, sorting out the NHS needs to be a priority, but also does sorting out social care for if it is not, sorting out the NHS will never be successful.
Both social care and the NHS are as important as each other and it could be said that social care even more so. For any lack of social care, as much detrimental effects on the NHS, creates more health situations and of greater degrees, leading to many more access to GPs and eventually hospitals. The hospital says could then be longer than they should be, due, not only to the gegree of health, but when patients are ready for discharge, but are still not fully able to care for themselves, but there is then an insufficiency of social care to undertake care of themselves. Thus creating bedblocking, which in turn means A&E are unable to free areas in A&E as there are no free beds on wards due to the bed blocking. This then means there are insufficient A&E capacity for ambulances to transfer their patients into A&E, so ambulances have to wait at hospitals under acces to A&E is available. This then creates a shortage of available ambulances for picking new emergency callouts.
The problems with social care are far from new, but no government as so far done much to solve the social care crisis, in fact many, if not all have been ignoring social care for many years. This was made worse since 2010 with the introduction of Tory austerity cuts and then additional costs of COVID.
So doctors leaders, do not be as shortsighted as the Government and include social care within your campaign for funding.
Source: New prime minister must prioritise NHS, say doctors’ leaders | The BMJ
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