Hawking: Saving The NHS Isn’t Astrophysics

When Stephen Hawking criticised the Conservative Government’s handling of the NHS in a speech on August 19 the Department of Health lazily replied with a tired manifesto pledge of extra investment rather than actually addressing the acclaimed physicist’s compelling case.

Now it may be peak holiday season but surely our politicians can do better than to simply brush off the words of one of the world`s greatest thinkers with some mindless “soundbites”.

Hawking delivered his speech at a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine in London organised to highlight threats to the NHS and the content which sparked the Government response was given to the BBC the day before.

Hawking’s View

“The crisis in the NHS has been caused by political decisions,” he said. “The political decisions include underfunding and cuts, privatising services, the public sector pay cap, the new contract imposed on the junior doctors and removal of the student nurses’ bursary.”

“The more profit is extracted from the system, the more private monopolies grow and the more expensive healthcare becomes. The NHS must be preserved from commercial interests and protected from those who want to privatise it,” he said.

He accused Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt of highlighting certain pieces of evidence over others to support his policies.

Outside the health service itself Hawking said that failures in the system of privatised social care for the disabled and the elderly had also placed additional burdens on the NHS.

The scientist certainly has a long history with the NHS. He contracted early-onset motor neurone disease at 21 and endured a tracheotomy in 1985 after suffering from pneumonia. The NHS offered to pay for a nursing home but his then wife Jane insisted on caring for him at home.

Government in defence

The Department of Health’s response read like a generic response to a customer complaint, with a formulaic resort to the Conservative Party’s last election manifesto. “This government is fully committed to a world-class NHS free at the point of use, now and in the future. That’s why we’re backing it with an extra £8bn of investment over the next five years,” it said.

“Today, there are almost 11,800 more doctors and over 12,500 more nurses on our wards than there were in 2010 and the NHS is seeing 1,800 more A&E patients within the four-hour standard every single day.

Despite being busy, the NHS has been ranked as the best, safest and most affordable healthcare system out of 11 wealthy nations, as analysed by the Commonwealth Fund.”

No one left in the office?

That’s like a restaurant telling you that they serve hundreds of customers every day and have an excellent service record so your one-off complaint about finding a huge shard of glass lurking in your pasta is obviously just you being unreasonable.

Those 1,800 more A&E patients who are seen within four hours seems less impressive when seen in its proper context. The last NHS performance report said there were a whole 2,073,782 attendances at A&E in July 2017 and of those just 90.3% were seen within four hours, well below the 95% standard. It is now two years since that target was achieved.

While the Government response to Hawking was right to celebrate the NHS it totally failed to address the substance of his arguments. Why not stop the glib soundbites and shut down Hawking’s complaints, not by simply denying his accusations but by acting upon them?

by Stewart Vickers

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