The NHS is failing Britons. It’s failing Britons at the end of their lives, failing Britons at various times during those lives and as we’ve recently discovered via an excellent article at Spiked Magazine, failing babies at the start of their lives.
Candace Holdsworth writing at Spiked has herself had the experience of having to suffer the indignities and dangers caused by poor NHS maternity and newborn care. No healthcare system is perfect but we should be expecting and being given a much better healthcare system than the NHS is providing.
Ms Holdsworth said:
This week, the Guardian revealed that the NHS is facing a £27 billion legal bill over negligent maternity treatment in England since 2019. This figure not only dwarfs the £18 billion budget set aside for newborn care in that period – it also represents nearly half of the NHS’s £60 billion overall negligence bill. The same report found that nearly 1,400 families took legal action against the NHS for obstetric failings in 2023 – twice the number in 2007. Despite numerous inquiries, reviews and public figures promising change – on cue, the Labour government is said to be considering a ‘rapid’ inquiry – it is clear Britain has been catastrophically let down by an institution we are constantly told to venerate.
Even to someone such as myself who is all too familiar with the NHS’s sometimes lethal problems this figure of compensation compared to the budget for newborn NHS care is utterly astounding. Ms Holdsworth is indeed correct when she says that the change that we are constantly promised after all and every inquiry into NHS maternity failures has not arrived.
Ms Holdsworth alleges that women giving birth in the NHS are not treated like human beings and as a mother herself and a person who has used NHS maternity services, she has experienced the inhumane treatment dished out to mothers and babies by the NHS. She talks of calls for pain relief falling on deaf ears, staff obsessed with the cult of ‘natural birth’ despite there being ample historical evidence that over-reliance on nature was the primary cause in the past of the massive levels of mortality among infants and their mothers. Ms Holdsworth talks about women temporary paralysed by drugs being left alone with their babies and being unable to pick them up or feed them or comfort them.
As Ms Holdsworth says this situation where a maternity system is forced to pay out billions in compensation to families for piss poor treatment is not normal in the developed world. I believe she’s correct on this based on the positive reports that I’ve read about the conduct of other healthcare systems in other developed nations.
The problems with NHS maternity services and indeed with the NHS in general, are as Ms Holdsworth says systemic. They are certainly not problems that can be solved by throwing yet more public money at the NHS. The issues that the NHS has with maternity, newborn care and in a whole host of other healthcare areas are not ones connected to funding or the availability of funding, they are caused by how the NHS was set up, how it is structured, how it is managed and how staff are trained and overseen. You can’t cure those sorts of problems with extra funds. Such problems can only be solved by the replacement of the NHS with something that works for patients and not, as we have at present, which is a system that only works for the staff and the management.
We should not go out and praise the NHS, instead we should be looking at ways of burying it and giving Britons a healthcare system that they deserve and which works for them.
I’ve said it before in the past and I’ll say it again but we are really not hating the NHS enough. It’s not serving us even close enough to how it should serve us.
Link
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/27/is-it-still-safe-to-give-birth-in-the-nhs