The Royal Free Hospital

ARE we going to have to get the battle bus out again?

It is well over a decade since our classic red double decker led a march of thousands of people along the Holloway Road to stop the closure of the maternity unit and the A&E at the Whittington.

The masses of crowd packing into the forecourt outside the hospital in Magdala Avenue sent a strong message out to the decision-makers: people are not going to stand for this.

The 2010 general election was just around the corner and politicians and candidates were falling over themselves to back the campaign to stop the cuts. Perhaps history will repeat itself as we enter another election year.

There will be tens of thousands of people living in Camden who were born in the Royal Free. Many parents will think back to it as a special place where their children’s life began, (Royal Free Hospital’s maternity unit faces axe, November 30).

What about the dedicated staff – those people we banged pots for through Covid – who will this week be feeling surplus to requirements?

But aside from the nostalgic and emotional arguments, the “case for change” being put forward this week by the NHS does not appear to stand up to much scrutiny.

It is a peculiar logic to look at the problem of not having enough staff to run a service, by thinking the answer is to just shut it down. If that’s where we’ve got to now, then anything could be up for grabs in the future.

For many years the NHS has been struggling to find enough staff to work on the wards. And because of this nurses and other low-paid workers end up working mammoth shifts, often unpaid, leading to burnout and – inevitably – leaving to find something less demanding.

Brexit did not help. But the main cause of the crisis is the government’s abject failure to give low-paid NHS workers a meaningful, life-changing pay rise.

The people who run the NHS are masters of the tick box consultation exercise. There have been so many NHS cuts and privatisations over the past decade – hundreds of beds, now in such high demand were lost – all justified with clipboards and charts in consultation engagement meetings.

This week officers at North Central London NHS stressed that “no decision has been made” – an absolute cast iron guarantee that a decision has been made – and the board will make the final decision after a meaningful debate with the public and staff.

But the reality is minds are made up and it will take some form of forensic legal analysis, a people power campaign and intense political pressure to change it. It should not be forgotten how this government has left the NHS in ruins.