Patients are treated at the Queen’s Hospital emergency room, in Romford, England, on March 20, 2023. A government-commissioned review into the National Health Service laid bare the challenge Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces after years of underinvestment. (Andrew Testa/The New York Times)
England’s National Health Service, one of the country’s most revered institutions, is in “critical” condition, according to a government-commissioned report that cited long waits for treatment, crumbling hospitals, mental health patients in “vermin-infested cells” and far fewer MRI scanners than in comparable countries.
The hard-hitting review, published Sept. 11, was commissioned by Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer. The dire state of the NHS was a key reason many people voted for his Labour Party in July, according to polls.
But the report underscores the scale of the challenge the government faces to revive a health care system that is in a spiral of decline after years of underinvestment and administrative meddling.
Starmer said in comments released Sept. 11 that he was working on a 10-year plan that could amount to the “biggest reimagining of our NHS” since its creation in 1948.
The report, written by Ara Darzi, a surgeon and member of the House of Lords, said that during the 2010s, when a Conservative-led government embarked on a stringent austerity program, the NHS was “starved of capital,” leading it to fall behind in investing in equipment, technology and buildings.
His findings will not surprise Britons, whose satisfaction in the health service is “at its lowest ever,” the report said. Still, even Darzi, who has spent three decades in the NHS, said that he was “shocked” by what he discovered.
Starmer described the findings as “unforgivable” in comments released before a speech Sept. 12, in which he planned to argue that the health service must “reform or die.”
Starmer said his government would focus on digitizing the NHS, moving care from overburdened hospitals to other settings in the community and investing in preventive health care.
Darzi’s report was particularly damning of the major restructuring of the NHS in 2012 by Conservative Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, which the report described as “a calamity.”
The health service’s capacity was “degraded by disastrous management reforms,” he wrote, while “the trust and good will of many frontline staff has been lost.”
The changes were intended to encourage more competition in health provision but were criticized for creating a fragmented and complex structure.
Chronic problems that had built up over years became acute when COVID-19 hit, and the NHS entered the pandemic with fewer available beds and fewer staff than most other high-income health systems, the report said.
c.2024 The New York Times Company. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
