Strikes in medical staff in NHS due to worsen.

Those who are in the public sector were pushed to the back of the line by the abundance of cheap labour curtesy of the EUSSR.

No because new remedies like that £2.5M per patient gene therapy become available and those new remedies that prolong life do not mean that those final high reliance on NHS days disappear, they are just pushed back in time with the interim also providing an extra load on the NHS.  

This isn't a bad thing but it is an increasingly in real terms expensive thing.

That would be less than 0.1% of NHS costs then.   I note that you've shifted your ground to exclude migrants.   16.5% of NHS staff are non British citizens and on top of that we have many more that were born outside the UK and now have British citizenship.  All are migrants and mean the NHS costs are significantly reduced - and their wage costs are ~46% of all costs.  That far outweighs that 0.1% debit side

The cost of these new medicines is taking the piss. I suggest we develop them ourselves and undercut the American rip-off merchants.

yes ideally it should be 0% but the effort required to get it to 0% would be disproportionate and worse we'd see people dying because they'd been denied treatment because someone wrongly suspected they weren't British

Even in the USA non citizens get immediate emergency care free.

That's more insightful than some might have thought, Vinny.

Back when I joined the NHS in the late 80s, hospitals were run mostly by former clinicians who understood healthcare and 'personnel departments' were small.

The uncomfortable reality for those right of centre, however, is that the NHS management and burgeoning HR industry therein that we have today is a result of Thatcher and her legacy. The belief during the Thatcher era was that the most efficient way to run public services was as if they were businesses. Cue an influx to NHS management of (mostly) men in suits, waving MBA certificates, who being deprived of a profit to make, switched to 'saving taxpayers' money' instead. As a result, we now have an NHS that has moved from 'how can we help?', to 'how can we NOT help?'. Constantly looking for ways to avoid giving a service and meanwhile diverting funds into pseudo-commercial vanity projects and finding more jobs for people in suits at the expense of people in tunics and lab coats.

I feel like this shouldn't need re-stating, but for those who don't know (and to remind those who don't care), my day job is teaching student nurses. Daily, I diligently evangelise for holistic, patient-centred care, based on the best available evidence, but I know deep down that when my charges hit the wards as qualified nurses, they are going to be going home every night disillusioned and miserable because the care they aspired to give as students is beyond their reach. They will have spent their shift finding ever more inventive ways to fob patients off with the bare minimum they can get away with, simply because there is insufficient time, insufficient staff and insufficient resources to give patients the 'best practice' care they were taught to deliver.

The same is true for doctors. They are under intense pressure from NHS management to fob patients off with the minimum they can medico-legally justify, to try and keep costs down. All healthcare professionals, from doctors and nurses to paramedics, radiographers, physios, occupational therapists, operating department practitioners and biomedical scientists are trained and educated to deliver gold standard care...and then arrive newly qualified in the NHS to find that even bronze standard is beyond their reach. Why? Because since Thatcher, with the collusion of Blair/Brown, the priority has shifted to doing everything on the cheap. For the record, I don't believe that even the Tories are planning to privatise the NHS, but the right's appetite for monetising anything they can has resulted in lower quality public services, because contracts are awarded not to the best bid, but to the lowest bid. A financial race to the bottom, where money is prioritised over quality of service. This country is surely now run by people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.