Viper wrote:MungoBrush wrote:Avon Barksdale wrote:MungoBrush wrote:
I see we've improved by 5 spots since the Gordon Brown days
Obviously these Conservative governments are doing a better job than Labour did.
Just as a point of full disclosure those figure were good to 2014 (I couldn't get the up to date figures as I am not a subscriber)
According to this article, in 2016 we had climbed to 17th:
http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1848
More conservative success stories
Any idea why, under Thatcher's Tories, waiting times for many operations rose to several years ?
Why hospitals were in such a bad state, many were on the point of being condemned ?
Why we were 10s of thousands short of doctors and nurses ?
Why thousands more died every year under the Tories ?
Of course..........just another Tory success story.
"By the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, waiting times in the NHS became so long that Labour started to make political capital out of it. Thatcher confirmed the public suspicion that the Tories didn’t care about the NHS by choosing to be treated privately. When she was challenged about this, she said she took out insurance “to enable me to go into hospital on the day I want, at the time I want, and with a doctor I want.” That’s all very well, thought many voters, but what about the vast majority of people who cannot afford private health care?"
Remember the crisis at Birmingham Children's hospital where heart operations had been postponed for lack of funding putting young lives at risk. The NHS had lurched from crisis to crisis during the 1980s and the Government had once more been forced to seek an extra £100 million from the Treasury to bale it out.
"Always by February and March it was money running out that caused theatre and ward closures, with surgeons left to twiddle their thumbs while waiting lists spiked up until the new financial year.
Look back down memory lane at some of the headlines before Blair came to power: “400 critically ill children turned away from intensive care units in the past three months due to a chronic shortage of beds and nurses” (Mirror, 21 January 1997). “1 in 7 operations cancelled due to cutbacks” (Mirror, 18 November 1996). “Chaos mounts as wards turn away the sick” (News of the World, 28 January 1996), ”Doctors reveal winter chaos in NHS” (Independent, 10 January 1997). Pictures of patients on trolleys abound among the old cuttings.
Plenty of Tory success stories there....