Nigel Day: Letter to the Oxford Times: ‘ Better Fund the NHS’
Posted: 28th January 2021
Dear Editor,
The letter by Lady Ball (January 21st), and your feature on that front page and the Opinion page do give an indication of our gratitude and pride in the NHS and the possibility of contributing to the local hospital charities. I would like to give some background to how the NHS has triumphed despite great difficulties.
A succession of governments have planned on dealing with a potentially massive public health emergency. In 2010, the Coalition Government identified a natural hazard such as an influenza pandemic as a tier one risk to our security and in 2015 again the risk assessment included the tier one category ‘Public Health: Disease, particularly pandemic influenza, emerging infectious diseases and growing Antimicrobial Resistance…’
Our governments of different political persuasions have all rightly identified the threat which pandemics pose as in the top risk tier, yet it is clear that the necessary level of investment has not been put into preparing for this major risk. After a decade of austerity, we are all aware of the inadequate funding of our NHS; the situation is bad enough in
‘normal’ times but during the coronavirus crisis it has disastrous consequences. But we don’t have to look far to see what has gone wrong when it comes to security policy and spending. The last two security strategies have designated the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and use as a tier two threat. Yet at the same time the governments that have produced these risk assessments have chosen to automatically pour – without question and consideration – £205 billion into a new nuclear weapons system to ‘meet’ this lower level threat, leaving the health system chronically underfunded and unable to meet the challenge of a pandemic. The same problem applies to the tier one threat ‘major natural hazards’ which includes severe flooding, the terrible impact of which we are seeing repeatedly. The government has abjectly failed to meet this threat too. The government is shown to have the wrong priorities. The pandemic threat was rightly identified, but our national resources have instead been squandered on weapons of mass destruction to bolster our shabby global image, instead of funding our health service to be fit for purpose. The consequences could not be more stark: 100,000 of us have died. There has been a lack of finance for more pressing life-affirming systems such as the NHS (which has been overwhelmed by the current Covid19 pandemic – with further pandemics forecast as unavoidable).
There needs to be proper funding for our NHS to prepare for the identified future risks.
Nigel Day
01865 248357
3 Harpsichord Place, Oxford, OX4 1BX.