Annual crisis at our hospitals: A&E chaos is symptomatic of indecision

IT is impossible not to feel considerable sympathy for the besieged nurses, doctors and ambulance staff trying to deal with the escalating crisis at accident and emergency wards. 

Equally, it is impossible not to have real concern for the welfare of patients stuck in a heartless limbo sustained by an entirely predictable bottleneck. However, the overriding response to this loaves-and-fishes fiasco must be a mixture of shame and frustration that this situation, essentially a job of management and the proper application of adequate resources, cannot be resolved in one of the richest countries in the world. Is our scheme of public administration, accountability and planning really so unfit for purpose that resolving this shambles is beyond us? Surely not, but this morning it seems as if we have broadened that old capitulation — “the poor will always be with us” — to include a new surrender: “The winter hospital crisis will always be with us.”

This society-wide failure stands despite the efforts of health minister after health minister, government after government, generations of health managers and clinicians and probably enough how-to-fix-it reports to fuel a good sized incinerator for the winter. Is this problem really so intractable?