The NHS is fast-becoming an absolute horror show (Image: Getty)
It’s a real-life horror story. I’m talking about the dossier of hellish testimonies from 5,000 nurses who say healthcare is now being delivered in the most “abhorrent, inhuman, animal-like ways” imaginable.
Patients are left dead for hours in corridors because medics are too busy to remove them. Pregnant women are miscarrying in corridors in full public view, the elderly are being treated in car parks and cupboards and left for hours on soiled stretchers. People with treatable conditions are dying needlessly and in pain because there’s no-one to see them.
Patients are packed so close together in corridors they’re actually vomiting on each other and ambulances are parked 18-deep outside hospitals with desperately ill patients needing treatment but not getting it.
Hell’s teeth, this is Britain – not some country in deepest darkest Africa. And this is not how a health service that gets £181billion a year should be operating, not when health services in other countries perform way better on much less. We’ve got to stop kidding ourselves that our NHS is the best in the world. It’s now on a par – and often worse – with Third World countries where human life is treated as cheap and doesn’t seem to matter.
When are governments going to get it? The NHS model doesn’t work anymore. It did back in 1948 when Nye Bevan created it but, 76 years on, it’s a shambles that shames us and has no place in a civilised society.
Why doesn’t it work? It’s not just about money. It’s because our population is exploding by a million a year thanks to legal and illegal immigration, plus elderly people are living much longer. Worse, there’s no decent social care system to take care of them so they have to stay in hospital when they don’t need to be there.
There’s no other health care system in the world like ours – free at the point-of-use – because everyone but us knows it’s entirely unaffordable and doesn’t work. And no matter how much money governments throw at it – it’ll never work which is why the model has to change. And, yes, people here who have got used to free health care will rant and rave at the merest suggestion of some form of privatisation.
But they should ask themselves, do they want to die in a hospital corridor? Do they want to lie in their own excrement for days? Do they want people they love dying needlessly? Do they want to lose their baby in a corridor? And if the answer is no, then we all have to start paying something towards healthcare.
Because what the nurses warn in this damning Royal College of Nursing report is that what’s happening in hospitals now has become “normalised”. It’s normal now for people to be left for two to three days in a chair or treated in a cupboard. It’s normal to die in a corridor before you ever get to see a doctor. And I’m sorry but that kind of hellish, undignified, inhumane healthcare cannot become our “norm”.
I’ve given striking doctors and nurses a hard time over the last year but the fact is this useless, creaking, unworkable health service rumbles on because of their hard work.
Caroline Abrahams of Age UK said this week: “Corridor care is an affront to a civilised society.” And she’s right. No-one wants to die distressed and alone in a corridor while people run past you too busy to hear your screams!
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A third of Gen Z workers – people aged between 18-24 – have “mental health” days off work for stress. And these Under 25’s are more likely to take a stress sick day than any other age group. Now what does that tell you – certainly not that other age groups don’t suffer stress, rather that they see it for what it is and get on with it.
Of course, it was Gen Z who in a poll earlier this week said they’re paying tradesmen up to £1,300 a year because they can’t change a lightbulb and because they’re scared of stepladders and the fact the bulb might be hot. Others were unable to identify a screwdriver, a spanner or knew how to change a tyre.
And this is the generation that keeps railing that Baby Boomers had it easy (well, apart from the fact most of our parents had just come out of a world war and had no money) and lambasting us for being able to buy our homes
Message to Gen Z – if you want to own your own home and have the money to pay tradesmen for the piddling jobs YOU should be able to do, you have to go to work and stop thinking of stress (which everyone has) as a medical condition. Tony Blair said it this week when he said young people were “medicalising life’s difficulties”.
He’s right. A real mental health issue is way more than just confronting the challenges of daily life.
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Michelle Obama is snubbing Donald Trump (Image: Getty)
In a supreme act of truculence, is refusing to go to ’s inauguration. Her hatred of The Donald is legendary but I’m guessing it took on a whole new dimension after she inserted herself into ’ election campaign and expected the American people to do what she told them – and vote Kamala.
They didn’t.
Realising she didn’t have as much clout as she thought must have been a smack in the face for Mrs Obama who imagines she enjoys goddess-like status in the US.
But why isn’t she mature enough to understand that America voted for Trump because they were skint and sick of a useless, woke government that did nothing for them and was ruled over by a doddery old bloke who doesn’t know what day it is?
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Who thought it was a good idea to let go on TV and claim responsibility for the Gaza peace deal? It made the silly old buffer look even more Loony Tunes than he actually is. There’s only one man responsible for that deal and it’s , who’s not even in office yet but is getting sworn enemies to talk to each other.
Of course, they’re only doing it because they’re terrified what the unpredictable Trump might do if they don’t (remember he said all hell would be let loose if Hamas didn’t release the hostages). But who cares how the deal happened – and of course it will do nothing to address the long term problem – but at least for now, thanks to Trump, the fighting stops and the hostages get to come home.
Sturgeon and Murrell’s divorce is a surprise to precisely no-one (Image: Getty)
News that and husband Peter Murrell are getting divorced is a surprise to absolutely no-one. And while rumours abound about who Nicola will end up with next (she’s been spending lots of time at the home of crime writer Val McDermid, who BTW is a fantastic woman). Anyway I don’t care who Nicola knocks about with or who her next amour is with, I just want to know who gets custody of the motor home?
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This year’s Oscars could be cancelled for the first time in their 96-year history because of the wildfires that have devastated LA.
No-one will care. People have learned the hard and hellish way this week what’s really important in life, and it’s not watching a bunch of woke, preachy, self-serving luvvies in borrowed frocks lecturing us from their privileged soap boxes about climate change, gender issues and diversity!
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A new poll says one in five adults aged 18-45 would prefer a despot to democracy.
Well that’s good because they’ve got one. Let’s see if they still like it in four years’ time when Starmer and his mob have done their worst!
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The is so predictable it’s tragic. It’s done what it always does when a presenter leaves (or is dumped) from a well-loved show – it’s shoved a woman in. Actually, in the case of Match of the Day, it’s shoved TWO women in – Gaby Logan, Kelly Cates and a bloke called Mark Chapman.
It won’t work but part of me hopes it does. Not because I give a damn about the ’s ratings, but because I’d hate the arrogant to imagine they’d plummeted because he’s gone!
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Rachel Reeves has compared herself to Margaret Thatcher and claimed she isn’t taking the calls for her to resign personally. Well she damn well should. Because they ARE personal. They go right to the heart of the problem – and that is her incompetence and her total inability to be Chancellor.
She also says she’s happy to be known as the Iron Chancellor – a nod to Maggie. Sorry, I’ve never heard anyone describe her as that. Useless, yes, delusional, certainly, inept, absolutely!
Reeves is in no way comparable to Thatcher who had guts, a brain, a vision and ideas. She catapulted an economically floundering Britain back among the leaders of the world’s industrial nations. Reeves is doing the polar opposite.
The other thing about the Iron Lady – she knew when to quit!