While all eyes look to Brexit, our NHS is about to collapse | Polly Toynbee

A perfect storm is looming as nurses leave their profession in droves. If a flu epidemic hits this winter, how will our hospitals cope?

Brexit casts its shroud over everything. The no-dealers grow more wild-eyed by the day; though sterling drops, prices rise. Chris Grayling says we can dig for Britain. There is a cabinet at war: the Tory chancellor is denounced as a saboteur by a previous holder of the office. But all this craziness does have one political advantage: it hides all the other crises the chancellor can’t possibly solve in his budget next month. Of these, the NHS and social care is the pressure cooker likely to blow loudest. In the Brexit hubbub, an eerie silence falls before what most NHS managers – and, indeed, NHS ministers – expect to be a near-as-dammit winter collapse.

Related: Almost 10,000 EU health workers have quit NHS since Brexit vote

Focusing attention on Brexit is a merciful distraction from all the other pressures bearing down on Hammond’s budget

Related: NHS nurses are being cast into a perfect Brexit storm | Polly Toynbee

Continue reading... October 17, 2017 at 10:30AM