A damning report has found that Brexit “fantasies” have compounded the severe challenges in the NHS.
A study by the think tank Nuffield Trust warns that Britain’s departure from the EU has worsened recruitment shortages while pushing up the price of some medicines and making some more difficult to obtain.
It also states that Brexit could worsen health inequality.
The findings of the study are a far cry from the promises of the Leave campaign, which promoted the idea that leaving the EU would hand the health service £350 million per week.
Mark Dayan, Brexit programme lead at the Nuffield Trust, said it was “undeniable that the NHS has faced three of the most difficult years in its history” thanks to the pandemic and inflation.
But he also said “the effects of Brexit appear to have added to the severe challenges and problems the NHS currently faces”.
“The economic hit of Brexit, combined with the worst cost of living crisis for a generation, is reducing living standards, creating additional need for health and care. Meanwhile a slowdown in EU and EFTA [referring to countries within the European Free Trade Association] recruitment is making shortages of urgently needed careworkers, dentists, and specialist doctors even worse,” he said.
“The UK has also apparently taken the worst of a period of medicines shortages which has swept across Europe. The fall in the value of sterling around the EU referendum, and the trade barriers erected since, are probably major factors in our unusually consistent and long-standing problems supplying vital products.”
The researchers say the NHS has struggled to recruit dentists, social care workers, and specialist doctors such as anaesthetists and heart and lung specialists since the EU referendum.
In the most extreme cases, recruitment has all but ground to a halt, with the researchers finding that despite the number of cardio-thoracic surgeons working in the UK having doubled in the five years leading up to the EU referendum, the rate of increase has now fallen to just 5 per cent.
Tamara Hervey, a Jean Monnet professor of EU law at City University of London, said: “We urgently need an honest national conversation about the post-Brexit context for medicines, equipment and devices supply and NHS staffing.
“The health sector, generally speaking, would like a closer relationship with the EU’s standards. There are potential benefits from a looser relationship with the EU, but capitalising on them would involve courageous political decisions. Instead, we have drift and fantasies.”
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