“Crumbling to the point of crisis”: so reads the headline from the Irish News of 16th April 2024, referring to the dire state of our GP medical services and the NHS in general. What should have been added to the headline were the words “by design”.
Those of us who live here; and are activists here, know all about it. It doesn’t matter now if you are seriously ill, it doesn’t matter if you have a sick screaming child and it doesn’t matter if you are old and ill, you will wait for days phoning for an appointment to hopefully see a doctor, which will end up being a nurse practitioner.
“No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” – Aneuran Bevin
Last year (2023) approximately 10% of NHS operations were carried out by private companies. That’s up from a 3% figure in 2011, according to the Irish News. That excludes all the private companies now employed to do cleaning, repairs and maintenance and now, increasingly, ambulance services. This is not to mention the privatisation of hospital buildings themselves.
Doctors are scarce, very scarce, in the north of Ireland, and deliberately so. Phoning the local Health Centre two hundred times just to get an appointment, is not uncommon. But even before you are granted the “honour” of an appointment or a visit to the practitioner, you will first be thoroughly screened by a receptionist – yes, a receptionist – to establish if you are really ill or meet some unspecified criteria. Yes, this is a supposedly “developed” part of the world, and yet the north of Ireland and Britain are now experiencing the consequences of the same “tactically devastated” health service, which really began under Thatcher.
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