As a cancer patient and retired GP, I am seeing first-hand how the NHS is struggling

Last time I wrote to the Guardian was the day before the last election, when I was sitting with my daughter who was about to start cancer treatment. In that letter (11 December 2019), I said: “Save [the NHS] please, by voting tactically to avoid another minute of Conservative misrule.”

Unfortunately, I am yet again in hospital, this time as the patient starting chemotherapy. My GP saw me the day after I felt a lump, I was seen by the surgeon within the two-week cancer wait, and my diagnosis and treatment was planned within the next two weeks. But then I was told I would have to wait eight weeks to start chemotherapy.

There were not enough day-case places to treat me earlier due to a lack of funding and nurses. Imagine waiting eight weeks when you know your cancer has already spread.

All the NHS staff I talk to feel that this government is allowing the NHS to fail so it can persuade the public that the system set up by Nye Bevan should be replaced by a private system. How many more people will have their lives shortened before the NHS problems are sorted?

As a retired GP, I sadly feel that primary care is almost beyond repair because of the reducing number of GP training posts available and because financial support is available to any clinician (physicians assistants, pharmacists etc) to work in general practice other than GPs. Clear evidence exists that patients seeing their usual GP are better treated, need fewer referrals and have better outcomes than patients seeing clinicians they don’t know and who do not have the extensive training that GPs have.

A lack of funding and beds means that hospitals are following closely behind. The fact that the government has not sorted out the junior doctors’ industrial action is also unbelievable.

Anyone who has seen the misery and financial ruin faced by patients in the US will know that our NHS is as important as relieving poverty. More tax for those able to afford it is the only way to ensure adequate support for the poor, for better education and the NHS.

We are not the selfish nihilists the Conservatives think we are. Labour needs to be careful that it doesn’t match the government too closely. Taxing the rich has to make sense.
Dr Amanda Platts
Millbrook, Cornwall

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