As, due to a medical condition, I’m now a captive customer of the NHS I’m learning for myself that the whole organisation is an completely badly managed lottery. Where you live, what sector of the health service you have to use or who manages or mismanages your NHS healthcare provider, determines what sort of care or non-care you may get. Apart from my initial ‘Soviet’ style customer service initial contacts with the NHS, I’ve encountered some good staff. However I consider myself extremely lucky. I’m not a woman having to give birth in one of the NHS’s maternity units, 67% of which have been determined by the Care Quality Commission to be ‘unsafe’. I’m not a person who has suffered from a lethal misdiagnosis or an elderly person in dire need or a person in a position of having to make use of the NHS’s generally awful and sometimes counterproductive mental health services. If I was in one of those categories then I’d be much more personally concerned about the failing NHS than I am. The NHS should not be a lottery like this but it is.

One area of NHS ‘care’ that is very much a lethal lottery is Accident and Emergency (A and E) departments. If you are lucky and you don’t live in an area where there are loads of illegal immigrants clogging up the A and E service using the NHS A and E department because they don’t want to register with a general practitioner, then you might be OK. Similarly if you are in a rural area where there is less pressure than in the city from the need for A and E to deal with the outcomes of street violence, then your chances of surviving A and E are pretty good.

However for a lot of people A and E can be a lethal nightmare where 250 people per week are dying unnecessarily at A and E with long waits for treatment being a significant causal factor in these deaths. Whilst I accept that those attending A and E for the correct reasons such as significant injury or serious medical emergency are going to end up with adverse outcomes no matter what is done for them, but it is likely that many more people could be saved if proper treatment was given at A and E in a timely manner.

The BBC reported:

More than 250 patients a week could be dying unnecessarily, due to long waits in A&E in England, according to analysis of NHS data.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine analysed the 1.5 million who waited 12 hours or more to be admitted in 2023.

A previous data study had calculated the level of risk of people dying after long waits to start treatment and found it got worse after five hours.

The government says the number seen within a four-hour target is improving.

This is despite February seeing the highest number of attendances to A&E on record, it adds.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) carried out a similar analysis in 2022, which at that time resulted in an estimate of 300-500 excess deaths – more deaths than would be expected – each week.

‘More deaths than would be expected’ seems to be a complaint that is all too easily aimed at the NHS in general and not just A and E. In fact it is so apt for the NHS that it could even be the organisation’s slogan as in ‘We are the NHS where there are more deaths than would be expected’.

I don’t believe that throwing more money at the NHS will solve the problem of excess deaths in A and E or prevent the deaths of those who die outside A and E in ambulances whilst waiting to be seen. It’s not money that the NHS needs to sort out its problems its better management and a severe curtailment of waste. While we have people dying unnecessarily in often squalid A and E departments, where we have people, many of whom have paid into the NHS all their lives waiting on trolleys in corridors waiting in vain to be seen by a doctor, then the NHS should not be paying for layer upon layer of feather-bedded incompetent management and utterly pointless diversity guff.

Everyone of these unnecessary deaths in Accident and Emergency departments is not just a horrific statistic but a collection of terrible tragedies for the individuals and the families and friends they leave behind. Even worse than that these deaths are an indictment on a system that was imposed on us as part of an orgy of post WWII Statism and which, unlike other formerly public sector entities, has neither been democratised, privatised or reformed to make it prioritise the needs of patients rather than the staff of the NHS.

Britons deserve better than what we are getting from the NHS we really do.