CLOSURE OF NHS WALK-IN CENTRES HITTING A&E

FAILING to see the wood for the trees has been a common theme of David Cameron’s Government, but the latest farce NHS Walk-In Centres is an issue which is playing with people’s lives.

It is well over two millennia since Aristotle first mused the concept of what made things happen, but the principle of cause and effect is evidently lost on the Tories.

So obsessed are they with enforcing their ideological blueprint on the UK that it seems they just cannot see beyond the end of their nose at the damage they cause.

First we saw it with the economy. They sucked the money out, increased joblessness and then scratched their heads as the welfare bill went up.

We’ve also seen it with councils. Budgets have been slashed, services have diminished and then the Tories declare it an outrage when local authorities are left with little choice but to increase council tax as they try to make ends meet.

It’s happened with policing, where there are now fewer bobbies on the beat, and it’s happened with fire services, where intervention work has been hammered and firefighter numbers have been slashed. The consequential increases in crime and delayed response times are an inevitability.

But the abominable way in which the Government has treated the much-loved NHS is among the worst of their attacks on public services. Quite aside from making a hash of a costly reorganisation which wasn’t even needed, their funding decisions are now leading to increasing numbers of NHS walk-in centres being closed up and down the country.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that fewer NHS walk-in centres will result in more people attending A&E departments. And nor do you have to be of Aristotle’s intellect to grasp that more pressure means slower service delivery.

The next logical step is the most devastating, though. And that is that a slower, bogged down A&E service inevitably leads to less prompt treatment and, awfully, the increased likelihood of deaths.

As is so often the case with this Government’s cuts, the ministers making the reckless decisions will largely be unwittingly shielded by the organisations being forced to react to them.

I don’t blame the clinical commissioning groups that are proposing closures of walk-in centres any more than I blame councils cutting services or emergency services being forced to remove frontline officers.

They have to make the best of a desperately bad situation, and they have a duty to protect and prioritise whichever services they are able to.

But I do blame the Government for, again and again, either failing to see or perhaps failing to care about how they are damaging lives.

That is why I have signed a Parliamentary motion highlighting that it is unacceptable to shut A&E departments when patients have nowhere else to turn, and pointing out the vital role NHS walk-in centres play in reducing A&E footfall.

We’re less than 100 days from a General Election, and the public need to make a decision on whether these relentless attacks to our services is what they want to sign up for.

I certainly don’t remember reading anything about crushing Britain’s public services in the Tory manifesto back in 2010, but that certainly looks likely to be Mr Cameron’s legacy.

Perhaps if the Tories suffer a huge collapse in support at the ballot boxes on May 7, it may finally help them to finally grasp what cause and effect is all about.