Seemorerocks: The backstory to the NHS hospital crisis

This is what we are being told

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55514363

Yes, the NHS beds crisis does sound familiar

Peter Hitchens

3 January, 2020

Read this news report: ‘Many A&E units have been severely overcrowded in recent days, with patients lying in corridors and ambulances queuing outside.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5240485/Health-officials-advise-dont-ill-ahead-cold-snap.html

‘Hospitals have already been forced to cancel tens of thousands of operations and NHS chiefs fear things will only get worse… On Tuesday, hospitals were ordered to cancel up to 55,000 non-urgent operations and put patients in mixed-sex wards to create more room.’

Sound familiar? But actually it’s three years old, from the Daily Mail of January 6, 2018, under the headline ‘Now the NHS tells us: Don’t get ill.’

If you look back into the archives of any newspaper or TV news station, you will discover that the NHS has a ‘winter crisis’ thanks to overloaded intensive care wards, year after year.

But nobody ever thought before that this could be solved by strangling the country and forbidding grandparents to hug their grandchildren.

I do not doubt that our intensive care units are overloaded now.

But it is odd, since this was so foreseeable, that the huge new Nightingale Hospitals have been so little used to deal with this.

Why were they built at huge expense, if not for this moment?

11 January, 2018