Second-class treatment for the English patient
THE NHS has long suffered from a postcode lottery where the treatment available depends upon which local trust area a patient lives in.
But it also suffers from an even more shocking form of unfairness – the failure to ensure people living in all the nations of Britain receive a similar level of healthcare.
In Scotland people with wet age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in later life, have been able to get the sight-saving drug Lucentis on the NHS for years.
The same has not been true of England or Wales where thousands have gone blind because of the refusal of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to pay for the drug. After years of dragging its feet it is to make Lucentis available – but not until the autumn.
While many thousands of people will be able to enjoy a better quality of life in old age it is shameful that many thousands more have already lost their sight and that the move is being implemented too slowly to save the sight of others.
These people know that their twilight years will, literally, be lived out in darkness because of the failure of the NHS to live up to its promise of dispensing the best care from “the cradle to the grave”.
Yesterday the Government also announced that in England prescription charges will rise to £7.10. Yet they were cut to just £5 in Scotland and are zero in Wales.
Likewise, the Welsh Executive is pushing ahead with a plan to abolish hospital car-parking charges and in Scotland people are entitled to free nursing care in old age.
Nobody should begrudge the people of Scotland and Wales improvements in healthcare but there is a common thread to these anomalies: the NHS is treating its English patients as second-class citizens. And that is unacceptable.
