A decade-long failure to address urgent repairs in hospitals across England has led to a dramatic rise in issues posing a “high risk” to patients and staff, ministers are being warned.
The cost of dealing with this backlog has almost tripled since 2015 in real terms, to £2.7bn this year. High-risk repairs have been the fastest growing part of the lengthy maintenance list over that time. It includes issues that could lead to serious injury to both staff and patients, or to major disruption of services or “catastrophic failure”.
The NHS lost more than 600 days – or 14,500 hours – of clinical time because of infrastructure failures in the last year, according to a new analysis seen by the Observer. The total maintenance backlog has now ballooned to £13.8bn in 2023-24, an 18% increase from last year. The figure is more than the NHS’s entire capital budget for the year.
There were 22 incidents of lost clinical time a day on average, according to the analysis of official data by the House of Commons library. Close to 80% of the time lost was due to incidents deemed to have the most clinical impact, including faulty roofs, water leaks, and broken lifts or heating systems. There were 1,584 “critical incidents” recorded, the most severe kind.
Blame David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak for this cluster fuck.
It’s basic Tory strategy.
Non-conservative governments need to be repeating shit like this ad nauseam, including the additional cost incurred by delaying repairs. The conservatives should not get away with the electorate forgetting shit like this and then pretending they are fiscally responsible…
But the electorate will forget as the conservative media keeps jangling the keys of the week for them to get outraged about, the progressive governments get pulled in every direction trying to fix every problem at the same time or at least be seen to be fixing it and at the same time lampooned by said conservative media for repeating the same point calling it “tired” when they rightfully blame the previous government for the mess they’re trying to clean up. The electorate disengages as they get rage burn out until they’re forced to pay attention because the election has been called. By then all they remember is the headlines from the conservative media, they get elected. The bosses are happy because they managed to weather the centrist government by convincing them to be left alone and controlling the attention of the plebs. Now their school mates are back in power for another 10 years so their asset portfolio can be taxed less and grow larger whilst those in the wage economy get shafted.
Same old neoliberal story.
That is unless the bosses decide that they can’t control the outrage of the plebs so instead they focus it away from themselves and onto minority groups and court a fascist to get elected. Then either way they win: the fascist erodes democratic institutions and formally establishes the oligarchy or fascist gets booted out and they get to install a “moderate” government further right leaning than the last moderate and get the neoliberal cycle back on track.
