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Britons face worst winter on record as NHS struggles

Bianca Rahimi

Press TV, London

Public trust in the UK’s most beloved institutions is wearing thin. With the flu season just around the corner, Britons are being warned that the country’s National Health Service is buckling under a deficit of 50,000 doctors.

The National Health Service that has offered free and effective healthcare for decades is in crisis mode. Front page news? There is only one GP for every 2000 patients in Britain in some areas 3000. That’s even more than last year and quantitative evidence suggests it could be partly due to Brexit.

The findings of a cross-government drill in 2016 accurately predicted that the NHS would be plunged into crisis if a pandemic hit, but the results were so damning and they were never published. Healthcare professionals have been fighting to save the NHS for years, witnessing with utter dismay, its defunding and the cutting of A&E beds.

Once the envy of the world, the NHS has now been fragmented. Efforts to privatize this well-loved institution have succeeded and reluctantly people are now going private to avoid waiting months if not years for treatment, and in some cases, to save their lives.

Trust was further eroded Tuesday, when MPs from all parties released a report on the lessons learnt from the country’s pandemic response. It described the government’s failure to prevent the spread of Covid-19 earlier as one of the country’s worst ever public health failures. The report hailed the country’s vaccination program as a success, but some would say 150,000 deaths was too high a price to pay.


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