Regarding the letter from C. Westland (CP, 16-12-22) referred to the OECD report stating that UK frontline health workers are the lowest paid in Europe.

I wonder if there is a link here with the recent investigation revealing that over 2,000 NHS executives are on six-figure salaries?

Amanda Pritchard, CEO of NHS England, has 20 directors on her board... and where is she?

Then there are the contracts with management consultants, charging £3,000 per day, the annual spend on external consultants has doubled since 2010 to around £640 million — enough to employ another 2,000 nurses.

I was interested to see the mention of Exercise Cygnus in the letter, this was the simulation in 2016, to see how well prepared Britain’s emergency services were for a pandemic.  

The report was never published and quietly buried, hence the panic-buying of PPE and other essential supplies when Covid struck, at a cost of many billions for UK taxpayers.

Jeremy Hunt was the secretary of state for health and social care at the time.  

On December 8, The Times reported that, according to Gareth Davies of the National Audit Office (NAO), “The nation is still ill-prepared for the next pandemic”.  

It is worth recalling the statement by Boris Johnson on September 7, 2021, when he promised an additional £36 billion — to eliminate the NHS backlog and reform social care.  

As it turned out, this still was not enough!

The key point about the OECD published data on health services is illustrated by their chart showing the number of beds per 1,000 of the population.  

The best two countries are South Korea and  Japan with 12.6 beds. The UK is near the bottom with 2.3 beds, just ahead of Costa Rica, Mexico and Columbia.

The number of hospital beds in England has been declining for 30 years, in spite of the population growth.  

This quote is from the OECD report: “The number of beds provides a measure of the resources available for delivering  the best services to inpatients in hospitals, if the beds are maintained and fully staffed.”

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