NHS 'just about ready to completely collapse' warns senior Calderdale doctor

GP and vice chair of Calderdale’s Health and Wellbeing Board Dr Steven Cleasby has told Calderdale councillors that health services have been left on the verge of collapse.

“With the strikes happening and everything else, the system is just about ready to completely collapse, if it hasn’t already done so in certain areas,” he told Calderdale Health and Wellbeing Board.

“So despite the best of efforts of partnership working, things are very, very, very difficult in the 50-plus tier, that’s the reality.”

The board was discussing pressures on the services this winter and what can be done to tackle them.

Risks include impacts of the cost-of-living crisis; infections and respiratory diseases; effect on health of darker, colder days; young people transitioning from one school to another and increased demand on services with reduced capacity.

Remedies include pro-active forward planning, promoting vaccination, offering guidance and using all available help and technology, the board heard.

Dr Cleasby said the difference since the pandemic was pressures on the service which used to peak in winter were now there all year round.

Covid was very much still an issue but vaccine take-up was massively lethargic, he said – something spilling over into other vaccines offered too – which meant people had lost their immunity and were just as vulnerable to the virus as three years ago.

Communicating what people could do to boost their health such as promoting vaccinations and stepping up warning campaigns about smoking and vaping could all help the fight against respiratory diseases, he said.

Chief operating officer of West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, Neil Smurthwaite, said services were as prepared as they ever were and each year additional resource was put in.

But some things were conflicting, for example the message coming back that using digital – one of the multiple ways through which people could access help - was not helpful and people did not want it.

Coun Adam Wilkinson (Lab, Sowerby Bridge) said the problem was that it tended to be the most vulnerable people who were excluded from digital health care because smart phones or broadband were not affordable to them, or they did not know how to use it.