Massive spike in excess deaths sparks calls for an ‘urgent investigation’: NHS crisis is blamed for nearly 3,000 more Brits than usual dying each week

38 comments

  1. Let the bodies pile up.

    Profits over people

    Keep the dogs hungry and desperate

    All comments by Tories / right wing pundits

  2. No, I strongly object to that title, you can tell it’s Daily Heil.
    NHS crisis isn’t to blame.
    The tories are to blame. Don’t blame the symptom, blame the cause.

  3. It’s complex but it is an issue years in the making and there is no one try cause for this, although a lot of people will try to blame one singular issue. The pandemic and pandemic backlog is obviously an issue, we cannot ignore that. People also became more unhealthy during lockdown and many have not changed their behaviour since.

    That said, austerity, poverty and staff shortages (caused by pay and conditions) have not helped. We have also underfunded social care, while acting as if it is not an intrinsic part of healthcare to begin with; we have also failed to prepare for an increasingly elderly population. Then you have the obesogenic environment we live in, high stress jobs and a terrible alcohol culture.

    Looking at all that at a glance, the NHS was always going to struggle when we focus on treatment of disease over prevention in the long term. It will get worse until we get proactive, both in terms of our own personal health and how we run the NHS.

  4. The past twelve years of policy have resulted in raised excess deaths. This is not something that international observers have failed to notice. We are being killed for profit.

  5. – NHS continually states for over a year at this point that it is in crisis mode, doesn’t have enough staff, is hemorrhaging those who remain, and desperately needs more funding and support to deal with the fallout from covid still.

    – Government instead cuts the covid funding boost, continually insists that more funding won’t help anything, and says NHS workers just need to work harder. Does absolutely nothing as the crisis continues to get worse and worse month by month for, again, over a year at this point.

    Yeah gee definitely the NHS at fault here.

  6. More fuel for the Tories to claim the only answer is to charge for use. Which would of course increase this number even more.

  7. Right. Because EU countries, Japan, Australia, etc all have a failing NHS..

    There’s a common denominator to all these nations that no one wants to acknowledge..

  10. So the worst weeks of deaths during the pandemic, the average weekly death count was around 1200. That saw the whole country locked down etc etc. Now, this NHS crisis is causing nearly 3000 deaths a week and it’s barely even news. WTF is going on.

  11. That’s what happens when the public supports policies that lead to this! Disgusting this should not be happening

  12. Do you wonder why we have 46,000 nurse vacancies at the moment?

    I am a student nurse. When I qualify, I will start earning in a high skills, high pressure job that will be paying £2 an hour LESS than I was earning prior to university for a shit agency call centre job that anyone could do.

  14. A few years ago we were using excess death stats to “expose” countries lying about Covid deaths.

    Could it be as simple as that? Covid deaths we are now lacking the medical surveilance to detect as we have shut down most of our testing program and apparently have given up on vaccinations/boosters.

  15. Given most of these are likely to be old…

    The Tories slaughtering the only folk who vote for them. Big brain politics

  17. NHS staff have been trying to warn the public for years and naysayers would respond “every year it’s the same thing”. Now the chickens are unsurprisingly coming home to roost and people are dying.

  18. What was the latest figure of majority elderly ‘expats’ that have moved back to the UK from Spain, Greece etc because they lost their EU healthcare? 500,000?

  19. This is a *super* basic cause and effect.

    When you lower funding in a health service, deaths go up. It *is* that simple. There is no mysticism or uncertainty around doing this. That is what that action *does.* So when Tories slash funding and then force NHS employees to just “work extra hard” without paying them, further exhausting their desperate workforce while also providing less and less support, this is the result. People die.

    At a national scale, people die *alot.* I guess it’s nice to know that number is 3000 per week… These are lives the Tories are ultimately responsible. The buck stops with them. 156000 excess deaths per year would be called a massacre under any other circumstance.

    But because it’s abstracted away, not a single tory voter gives a shit. This is the price the tories are willing to pay to make a quick profit. And this is profit not just by starving the NHS, it’s by the private healthcare that they will inevitably put in its place when it falls.

    It’s times like this where I wish we were more like the French. We should have split these marauders from balls to brain long ago to stop the pillaging of this country.

  23. We have established that up to 1000 death pre day are acceptable to the public.

    That being said, I am surprised how quickly the NHS deteriorated. I guess they have been on the edge for a while.

    And it is true that this is mostly a social care crisis. Social care is much more affected by Brexit than the NHS as a whole.

    PS: I never understood why people would trust the Conservative Party with the NHS. Every time they are in power the bring the NHS to the brink, and then Labour has to spend a decade to get it back into shape.

  24. A crisis that is engineered by the govt, almost a decade and a half and maybe longer, of under funding, under staffing, under paying, all things the govt controls, all things the nurses and paramedics currently striking are trying to highlight, all to push the NHS towards privatisation, to further line the pockets of the already rich using people’s health’s as the leverage, everyday the ideals of the US capitalist machine seep deeper and deeper into everything that makes the UK great for the benefit of the few, sad really.

  26. So pay the professionals who do the job a wage where they can go to work, save lives and not worry about eating.

    The media is really trying to put the weight of the moral issue onto the workers rather than those who refuse to pay for the work.

  30. It’s not the NHS staff who are responsible for this spike in excess deaths. There is no NHS in Africa. Remember the hullabaloo in the press because an entire continent didn’t get vaccinated, that the rich West was hoarding the vaccines at the expense of poor Africa? Well, there [haven’t been the deaths predicted even though vaccine uptake was incredibly low](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/health/covid-africa-deaths.html). The well-vaccinated West has fared worse. As much as I loathe them it’s not even the Tories to blame.[Follow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-N-17_j_44) the [money](https://raindrop.io/JW_Lists/covid-lists-30427555).

  32. But large numbers access deaths are occurring in every European country too, must be something else causing it, not the NHS problems.

  34. There are a lot of doctors raising legitimate concerns about this and MPs are starting to ask probing questions in parliament. It’s clear that the cabinet is not very happy about this and they are dodging questions.

    It’s not at all clear what is causing this but a comprehensive and unbiased enquiry is urgently required. The answers that the government are giving are not satisfactory nor based on complete evidence.

    Whatever the cause or causes are, all possibilities must be fully explored without exception. There would be no negative consequences to a full and complete enquiry.

  36. Ironic that the Daily Mail, a comic for dribbling, easily triggered, feeble-minded cunts with zero critical thinking capabilities should be requesting an investigation when they have staunchly supported the very party (the party for dribbling, easily triggered, feeble-minded cunts with zero critical thinking capabilities) that is _solely and entirely responsible_ for the excess deaths.

    What’s the betting that their “investigation” finds that it is nothing to do with themselves or the Tories and they spin a new narrative for dribbling, easily triggered, feeble-minded cunts with zero critical thinking capabilities to believe without question and which will be parroted ad-infinitum until it somehow passes into being a “truth.”

  38. People in this country have their heads in the sand

    No country in the EU except Spain has a system even close to resembling the NHS. Go outside Europe to our good friends with exceptional health care like Canada, Oz and the likes of Singapore and Korea and neither do they. Indian healthcare is very good and also does not have an NHS style system.

    A reckoning is currently underway. The mission statement of the NHS is amazing and the country really wills it to deliver and it’s great, but it can’t continue.

    Every year it’s burning more cash (and I’d argue that’s a fundamental of its model and not solvable) and service declines a %. Meanwhile other nations are innovation which improves their health care by % every year. This will compound and by mid century we could be looking at having a vastly inferior health and quality of life.

    Our obsession with the NHS model and unwavering defence of it, unwillingness to change, is a dangerous thing.

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