{"id":321904,"date":"2025-12-18T00:39:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T00:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/321904\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T00:39:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T00:39:17","slug":"wes-streeting-should-stay-in-his-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/321904\/","title":{"rendered":"Wes Streeting should stay in his lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the week before Christmas, and as I listen to desperate patients and exhausted colleagues, Wes Streeting\u2019s words ring hollow. The Health Secretary speaks about winter pressures and a \u201csuperflu\u201d as if we are dealing with a sudden, unpredictable weather event. But in A&Es across the country, the reality is far more brutal. To be an emergency doctor right now is to stand on a battlefield where the generals have abandoned the post, leaving the soldiers to manage a slaughter that was entirely foreseeable.<\/p>\n

Every winter, emergency departments prepare for the familiar seasonal surge. We have the same warnings, the same predictable rise in admissions. This year, in my department, a growing number of patients are dying before they are even admitted onto a ward. Ailing patients lie on corridors for hours and often days, waiting for beds that simply do not exist. The data<\/a> confirms what clinicians see. Flu admissions have spiked by 55% in just seven days to an average of 2,660 patients a day \u2014 the highest ever recorded for this time of year. Norovirus cases alone have jumped 35% week-on-week, filling hundreds of beds that we desperately need. Meanwhile, the overall waiting list has crept up again to 7.4 million.<\/p>\n

Nowhere is this dystopia more visible than at Leicester Royal Infirmary \u2014 not far from where I work \u2014 which has become ground zero for the crisis<\/a>. In a single day last week, 932 patients streamed through its doors \u2014 an 8% increase from the previous year. The human cost of this overcrowding is staggering: one patient endured an agonising 106-hour wait for a bed, while another languished for 34 hours. The hospital has had to convert prefabricated structures into permanent wards just to house the overflow. When you have children\u2019s waiting areas filling up by late afternoon and \u201cpatients in every cubicle\u201d, as consultants there have reported, you know the system is broken.<\/p>\n

Seasonally, it\u2019s the toxic cocktail of the flu, Covid, RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) and Norovirus commonly known as the \u201cquademic\u201d that\u2019s driving this epidemic. However, to even call it a \u201ccrisis\u201d would imply a degree of surprise \u2014 and that is the lie at the heart of this disaster. We are witnessing what I can only describe as a total disconnect between our key decision-makers, the chronically ill and the clinicians tasked with saving them.<\/p>\n

Everybody knew this quademic was coming. Not least Wes Streeting. Any competent leader \u2014 whether a military general or a health secretary \u2014 understands that the role requires foresight, planning and strategising. We saw the bed pressures as far back as August. We knew that as soon as millions of children returned to their schools in September, the weather changed, the cold and damp set in, that all four virus vectors would align.<\/p>\n

He should have been fixing the roof while the sun was shining. A competent strategy would have prioritised immediate winter survival over long-term reform rhetoric. Streeting should have secured emergency funding for \u201csurge beds\u201d and social care placements to unblock the back door of A&E, rather than vaguely promising \u201cneighbourhood health centres\u201d for the distant future. Crucially, he should have resolved the resident doctors\u2019 dispute months ago. By allowing the pay negotiations to drag into December, thus contributing to a strike-depleted workforce, he is exacerbating the H3N2 \u201cflu-nami\u201d. A robust vaccination campaign and a secured workforce were the bare minimum requirements for preparation.<\/p>\n

Yet we are led by what can only be described as \u201cprofessional amateurs\u201d. To be fair to the current Health Secretary, the rot set in long before he took office. As Lord Darzi\u2019s independent investigation concluded back in September, the NHS was already in \u201ccritical condition\u201d after 14 years of austerity and capital raids. We have fewer beds per capita than almost any comparable European nation, and the crumbling estate forcing patients into corridors is a legacy of long-term neglect, not just recent failure. Instead of leading from the front and tackling the quademic head-on, our political and management class are looking over their shoulders to consolidate their own positions \u2014 or looking ahead at the next big shiny gig.<\/p>\n

As the old saying goes, \u201ca fish rots from the head\u201d. The Health Secretary seems more preoccupied with the optics of reforming the NHS and going toe to toe with the BMA and junior doctors. His political manoeuvrings are becoming a distraction: he\u2019s patently more focused on the path to Number 10 than the clinical catastrophe unfolding.<\/p>\n

While the crisis continues to worsen, Streeting has admitted in an interview<\/a> that he\u2019s \u201cpretty frustrated\u201d \u2014\u00a0 but he was referring to his own party\u2019s polling numbers, not the crisis in the NHS. He bemoaned Labour\u2019s \u201cpractical, technocratic approach\u201d for making the government look like a \u201cmaintenance department for the country\u201d, worrying that voters might switch to a \u201ccheaper maintenance company\u201d. It\u2019s as if Streeting\u2019s team is continually briefing the media with a key message: \u201cit\u2019s not Wes\u2019s fault.\u201d Rather than preparing the nation for the worst, Streeting\u2019s spin doctors are prepping the public with doublespeak, rebranding the flu as \u201csuperflu\u201d. He\u2019d have been better off listening to clinical advisers who have warned him for months about the scale of the problem we face.<\/p>\n

The warnings were explicit and on the record. The UK Health Security Agency produced winter scenarios as far back as September predicting that this specific combination of viruses would breach capacity. In early December, NHS National Medical Director Professor Meghana Pandit expressly warned that the \u201cunprecedented\u201d flu wave combined with industrial action was pushing the service toward a \u201cworst-case scenario\u201d. Even Dr. Jack Fletcher of the BMA warned that failing to settle the pay dispute before winter would leave the government \u201cowning every inch\u201d of the collapse. Streeting simply cannot claim ignorance when the alarm bells have been deafening. But instead he chose Orwellian trickery, a futile PR-driven battle with an intransigent BMA or simply disappearing when the going gets tough.<\/p>\n

His lack of preparedness makes the fictional ineptitude of Yes Minister\u2019s Jim Hacker look like the work of a neurosurgeon. It is a profound failure of strategy where the leadership is reactive rather than pre-emptive. Streeting has waited until the trolleys are backed up to the sliding doors before feigning shock-horror, abdicating responsibility and blaming the situation on yet another \u201cunprecedented\u201d set of circumstances.<\/p>\n

The tragedy is that the pandemic should have taught us one simple lesson: we cannot afford to be flat-footed in the face of a crisis. We knew the variants were coming. We knew immunity gaps existed. And we know what the fallout will be. Yet, a clear and present plan to tackle any of this is nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

So, when you read about the \u201cwinter crisis\u201d in the coming weeks, spare a thought for those worst affected. The elderly, the sick and the vulnerable I will be treating over the holidays are once again collateral damage in a political failure dressed up as an inevitability. Do not accept the narrative that this is an unavoidable act of nature. This is a man-made disaster, fuelled by complacency and a political and bureaucratic class that has forgotten that their primary job is not to massage news cycles and win elections but to keep the public alive and well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the week before Christmas, and as I listen to desperate patients and exhausted colleagues, Wes Streeting\u2019s words…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,104,56,54,55,7747],"class_list":["post-321904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-nhs","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wes-streeting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}