According to my local MP the UK has loads of ICU beds, respirators and the staff to operate them. He says the NHS is doing well locally. The fact that we went into this crisis with only around a quarter of the NHS beds we had when the service began in the late 1940s seems not to have bothered him a jot. It’s true that some of that reduction can be explained by the number of services currently delivered in the community. But that doesn’t account for such a massive drop in infrastructure given how many more of us there are now than there were 70 odd years ago immediately after a worldwide war.
A large part of the reason why we went into this crisis so unprepared is because of 10 years of conservative cuts on the health service.
A large part of the reason why we went into this crisis so understaffed is because the tories have spent the last 10 years abusing the workforce.
A large part of the reason that we went into this crisis so under-resourced was because when everyone else was buying up PPE, ventilators and other equipment we were still being told to sing happy birthday by our Prime Minister who made a song and dance about shaking hands with hospitalised Covid-19 patients. What an example to set!
And now – Now – they tell us that we’ve plenty of ICU beds. If so, why is the government developing protocols that deny ICU care to older people?
Why are we preventing care home patients from entering ICU or even ordinary hospital wards should they contract Covid-19?
Why has government policy been not to count care home deaths, even when the figures are available?
I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do know this…
Ever since Cameron formed his ConDem government in 2010 the tory party has waged war on benefits claimants.
The largest and most expensive group of benefits claimants are old age pensioners and long-term disabled citizens.
The government didn’t start this pandemic – no government did – but that doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of it.
Boris’ original ‘do nothing’/Herd immunity plan would have been a brilliant way to cull the elderly and the sick but the media let the cat out of the bag along with citizens from other countries like Italy and they had to change tack.
So next they lied about trying to source ventilators etc whilst refusing to join the EU procurement scheme and failing actually to put in any orders.
The media called them out on that too so they started work on building extra capacity and attempting to encourage people back to work in the NHS that the government drove them out of so recently.
Then they realised that they could still cull the elderly by encouraging DNACPR agreements on the grounds that we need the ICU beds for people who pay tax. They could reserve the real treatment for those people who had a chance of increasing tory party donors’ profits once they get back to work. So they set up a kind of stealth rationing system until once again the media called them out on it. Now they pretend to be some sort of rescuer when actually it was their policy in the first place.
This stuff raises a lot more questions than it answers but here’s some very straight inquiries for my MP, Mark Jenkinson…
If we have such wonderful capacity in the NHS, why did anyone feel the need to blanket DNR the elderly population in the first place?
Was it a decision born of necessity like battlefield triage (unnecessary if we have all that spare capacity) or of ideology and a desire to cull the ‘useless eaters’?
Does the NHS have all this spare capacity you speak of simply because it’s not treating senior citizens and abandoning those whom the government considers too expensive to breathe?
Left eye view 