A&E mess – it’s really all about the beds

Here we go again. Another winter, another NHS A&E crisis and our useless politicians are all throwing rocks at each other. So, what has gone wrong?

On the Right they blame things like New Labour’s ludicrous new GP contracts which made many GPs millionaires while removing any requirement to provide out-of-hours service, excessive immigration, foreigners flying in to abuse our increasingly International Health Service, the high birth rates of our M*sl*m friends, fat idiots who want gastric bands because they can’t stop eating fast food and self-obsessed nobodies who want cosmetic surgery to solve their ‘psychological problems’

On the Left they blame increasing privatisation of NHS services and, of course, old people who having worked and paid taxes all their lives don’t have the good grace to drop dead instantly on retirement and so expect the NHS to provide some level of care when they fall ill.

And everyone blames useless, aggressive drunks who clog up A&E most weekends.

Each of our political parties claims they can be trusted with running the NHS – ‘only we can save the NHS‘ (Labour) or ‘a strong economy means a strong NHS’ (Tories). (Who knows or cares what the LibDems claim?)

But the one thing none of our rulers dares mention is the incredible speed at which the number of hospital beds has been slashed by both Labour and Tories (click to see more clearly)

Yet as beds are being closed, spending on the NHS keeps on going up:

If voters actually knew how many hospital beds both New Labour and the Coalition have cut, then there would be outrage over our lying politicians’ promises about preserving NHS services.

So, at a time when the three groups that need hospital beds the most – M*sl*m baby machines, freeloading foreigners and pensioners who are so selfish that they won’t willingly follow the ‘Liverpool Pathway’ or the Mid-Staffs ‘die today’ solution to hospital overcrowding – are expanding, our rulers are cutting the number of available hospital beds. Am I the only person who suspects there is something that doesn’t make sense here?

There are, of course, many reasons for the chaos in A&E. I’ve listed quite a few of them above. Both those on the Left and Right are correct in identifying some of the problems. But one of the most important (and the one no politician of Left or Right dares mention) is how a massive reduction in available hospital beds means people \are getting stuck in A&E unable to be admitted to wards causing blockages, backlogs and sometimes total paralysis of the system.

The winter A&E crisis – I suspect that it’s really all about the beds, or rather lack of beds.