Even factoring in the many manifestations over recent years of the NHS’s deep crisis, some of Lord Ara Darzi’s findings in his verdict on the state of the service are arresting. A&E is in such “an awful state” that thousands of people die every year because they aren’t seen there fast enough.
“Starving” the service of vital capital funding has left “crumbling buildings, mental health patients being accommodated in Victorian-era cells infested with vermin with 17 men sharing two showers, and parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portable buildings”. Efforts to improve early diagnosis of cancer saw “no progress whatsoever made … between 2013 and 2021”, despite many lives depending on that.
