Poor care and long A&E trolly waits have become “normalised”, the NHS’s new chief has warned.
Sir Jim Mackey said unacceptable care was happening so often that staff had become” desensitised” to it as financial squeezes had made it more difficult to provide essential services.
His warning comes after a survey of NHS trust chief executives revealed hospital leaders were considering cutting jobs and scaling back maternity and emergency care in some areas to meet the government’s “eye-watering” financial demands.
Around 6.2 million patients are waiting for NHS treatment, a figure that’s been growing steadily since 2013 when it stood at just under 3 million.
Meanwhile, the NHS is facing a £7bn national spending deficit for the coming financial year, which health leaders need to help cut. That is up from around £2.5bn in 2015-16.
Speaking at an event for the Medical Journalists Association in London, said: “Things that have become a bit normalised over recent years that we would never have accepted. So 10 years ago, we would have never accepted old ladies being on corridors next to an ED department for hours on end, and that’s become normal in the NHS.”
“I think we just sort of gradually moved to a point where we’ve accepted things that we should not really have accepted, and we need to stop accepting it and the hard bit is what we what we do about it.
“Most people know that, the worry is when they’re desensitised to it… It’s actually not their problem; they have found a way of walking around it. Colleagues used to describe it as ‘learning walk with a limp’.”
Sir Jim Mackey took over as chief executive for NHS England in March as the government announced plans to axe the arms-length body to save money and cut duplication.
When asked who was to blame for the decline in care, Sir Jim said: “I think it was failures on all parts, the money was squeezed too much, probably centrally at the political level. There’s arguments about prioritisation and resource, about the oversight system.”
The new NHS chief promised NHS organisations would be forced to be more transparent about their performance and outcomes for patients.
He said this should apply to the private sector, with whom there is now a push to increase the level of NHS work it takes on to help clear long patient waiting list.
When asked if the private sector offered value for money, he said: “There shouldn’t be a case where anybody’s getting paid more or less for the same thing. Everybody should get paid on the same point. There’s a bit of work to do to get to that point again.”
Asked about independence from politicians, Sir Jim said: “I’ll have no problem telling anybody what I think – if I have a view, I’m going to express it, and if I think something’s wrong, I’m going to say it.
“But I’m very confident in the way that I’ve seen Wes [Streeting] work his political team and the prime minister, that they actually don’t want somebody to just sit, just go along with everything, and just roll over and not say if they have a they have a view, and I’ll take that seriously.”
Speaking about the demise of NHS England, Sir Jim also said that it was “naive” to believe an organisation which “is the biggest consumer of public resource in the country” could be politically independent.
“I understood the logic at the time, I think it was probably, in hindsight, a bit naive to think that we could make something politically independent and less directly controlled by the political system for something that is the biggest consumer of public resources in the country,” he said.
On spending, he said: “The NHS is such a big part of public spending now, we are pretty much maxed out on what’s affordable.
“It is really now about delivering better value for money, getting more change, getting back to reasonable productivity levels, but in a way that’s human and is about standards and about quality.”
