This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist.
Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door.
Let's be clear: we do need many more doctors and nurses, but the existing ones can't do their jobs because their wards have turned into medically-fit nursing homes. They spend half their days trying to send people (who don't have care requirements) home faster than they'd like.
Why? Because central government withdrew funding. Social care is now on the council to fund and many councils have squashed social care, along with libraries and early years provisions. The trap of outsourcing caught many councils out.
Turns out the whole endeavour was yet more myopic, Tory penny-pinching.
Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door.
Let's be clear: we do need many more doctors and nurses, but the existing ones can't do their jobs because their wards have turned into medically-fit nursing homes. They spend half their days trying to send people (who don't have care requirements) home faster than they'd like.
Why? Because central government withdrew funding. Social care is now on the council to fund and many councils have squashed social care, along with libraries and early years provisions. The trap of outsourcing caught many councils out.
Turns out the whole endeavour was yet more myopic, Tory penny-pinching.