The demand pressures that our National Health Service faces this winter has been in the news recently, but it has been spun by those with a political agenda that NHS funding has been cut. This is simply untrue. The only part of the UK that has seen reductions in health spending is Wales, where the devolved Welsh Assembly (controlled by Labour) runs the NHS. The financial facts speak for themselves. Every year, NHS funding is greater than the year before. The government has committed to increase funding for the NHS by an extra £10billion a year by 2020, of which £6billion will have been delivered by the end of 2016-17.
We continue to see an increase in the numbers of doctors and nurses employed by the NHS. For example, we saw an additional 32,467 doctors employed in the NHS in 2014 compared to 2004. There were also 18,432 more NHS nurses in 2014 compared to ten years earlier. The same trend exists with GPs with 5,729 more GPs and 1,688 more practice nurses employed by GPs in 2014 than ten years earlier.
Extra resources continue to be made available to the NHS and it continues to do ever more, but we all know it faces ever growing pressures in keeping up with an ever increasing demand. I was surprised to learn that the NHS deals with over one million patients every 36 hours. Last year there were 40% more operations completed by the NHS compared to ten years earlier, with the number increasing from 7.22million to 10.12million.
While it is great that life expectancy continues to rise, we have an aging population and the last twenty years have seen obesity and diabetes rates grow. Pressure on adult social care budgets is also rapidly growing and as a country we need to find ways to address and pay for this growing demand, as well as encourage the preventative agenda of healthier lifestyles. My view is that we need to remove the party politics and find a long-term political consensus that the current and future governments of whatever persuasion can work to.
Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group
11th January 2017