'The NHS is there to help keep us healthy and cured - but the system is collapsing'

The NHS is there to help keep us healthy and look after us when we are sick, and if they need a helping hand private hospitals to perform these essential functions, so be it

Pat Cullen, General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing joins striking nurses outside St Thomas' Hospital (

Image: Hesther Ng/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock)

Few politicians have the courage to speak hard truths to the NHS if it is to survive.

It's because they fear a backlash from voters who view the criticism as a threat to our greatest post-war achievement.

Yet those who claim that a health service that was the envy of the world when it was created in 1948 are fit for purpose as we enter 2023 are burying their heads in the sand.

Caregivers are as compassionate and caring today as they were then. But even they can no longer sustain a collapsing system around them - which is why nurses and paramedics will strike this week.

They know the NHS doesn't work. The seven million patients on hospital waiting lists know this too. And Wes Streeting is bold enough to say it doesn't work.

Yet the Shadow Health Secretary lashed out for calling the NHS a service, not a sanctuary.

A sanctuary is for the dead. Mr Streeting's plan is to keep the NHS alive.

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Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting (

Picture:

Nigel Howard)

Her ambition is an NHS so good that no one will need to pay for treatment. But in the meantime, it will make full use of the spare capacity of the private sector so that free care can be delivered more quickly.

The NHS is there to help us stay healthy and look after us when we are sick. And if it needs a boost from private hospitals to perform these essential functions, so be it.

Only stand-up comedians find something funny about five million patients a month unable to get appointments with...