Trust me, I’m a doctor – Labour’s prescription for the stricken NHS needs a rethink

Labour had earmarked last Wednesday for the big launch of its health proposals – a plan to reform the NHS after years of Tory mismanagement: namely, 40,000 more appointments every week, with extra evening and weekend clinics, in order to bring down waiting lists to no longer than 18 weeks.

But then Diane Abbott got in the way, and junior doctors announced a new strike the week before the election, and all that messaging got rather lost.

Fortunately, a few key attention-grabbing remarks had been trailed in advance by Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary. Unfortunately, they served only to leave doctors like me confused, as well as concerned that the Labour Party must be either naive or arrogant when it comes to how it plans to manage the NHS should it return to power.

There is no doubt that waiting lists need to fall, and use of private sector capacity to help bring them down would be a welcome change. But the lack of detail around the suggestion leaves more questions than answers.

Private hospitals already use NHS clinicians to function, meaning a further increase in staffing numbers will be required to implement this. If the NHS was a patient, it would have chronic illness, and using private hospitals is the equivalent of trying to treat a cancer with a bandage. It is not a long-term solution to an issue that has existed for years.

Staff shortages are exacerbated by the training crisis that has been ignored by successive governments and, currently, Labour has not acknowledged the issue. For years, political parties have been telling the public they are increasing the number of medical students to create the illusion they are training lots of new doctors – but the lack of foresight has meant there has not been a simultaneous increase in speciality training places, leaving a large pool of junior doctors who are at risk of being unemployed.

It is nonsensical to highlight the need for more doctors to help deal with waiting lists, but fail to give them the opportunity to specialise and become part of the solution to the problem.

Another of Streeting’s key proposals is the use of out-of-hours appointments to boost the number of patients that are seen. This includes voluntary weekends and evenings for NHS staff.

But most doctors, including myself, already work weekends, on a non-voluntary basis. Is giving overworked staff more hours really going to solve the issue?

Using league tables to rank different hospital trusts seems to be rhetoric that the Labour Party believes will bring voters onside, rather than a genuinely useful policy. When patients are unwell, often acutely, they just want to be seen by a doctor as soon as possible – but introducing these league tables could result in a naming and shaming culture, heaping further pressure on overworked staff.

In recent weeks, I have spoken to various colleagues, and like myself some of them have spent years hoping for a change of government. Sadly for us, what the Labour Party is proposing won’t tackle the issues that are getting worse and risk the future of our beloved NHS.

It’s time Streeting and Starmer spoke to the people on the front line of this crisis.

Dr Ammad Butt is a doctor in Birmingham