4 minute read
THE COST OF A BANK HOLIDAY
THE COST Bank OF A Holiday BY DAYNA LATHAM
Mass cancellation of ‘non-urgent’ medical care for the Queen’s funeral insults disabled communities, writes Dayna Latham
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As the number of people on NHS waiting lists hit 6.8 million - with 377,000 people waiting over a year for treatment - many of us woke up one day in September and started our usual pandemic-era doom scrolling routine, only to find out from Twitter that NHS treatments were being pushed back once again due to the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral being declared a national bank holiday. I - like many others - assumed I’d already reached peak cynicism, with the BMJ blaming the government for overseeing the worst NHS dissatisfaction rates in 25 years back in March. Yet here we are! Whilst the government tried to reassure the public that only ‘non-urgent’ treatment was being postponed, that phrase is entirely subjective. Non-urgent care includes some cancer treatments, reproductive health treatments, and joint replacements - not to mention med reviews, therapies and psych referrals. If you’ve been waiting for an operation since before COVID, sure, your life may not be at immediate risk - prompting a doctor who is largely removed from your lived experience to deem your treatments essentially unimportant - but the quality of your life has undoubtedly been steeply declining with every passing month you wait. Now, I must clarify that not all hospitals cancelled nonurgent care: it was somewhat of a postcode lottery. There has also been ambiguity on whether the government will reimburse local health authorities for the added expense of not just wages but also peripheral costs like patient transport, so those areas already struggling the most have been the hardest hit.
Disabled and chronically ill people are vastly overrepresented on waiting lists, and they’re also the groups who have sacrificed the most throughout the pandemic. Some are still shielding, and others started shielding again in the run-up to now cancelled appointments. According to Nuffield Trust, patients rating their satisfaction as 0/10 had already doubled since the start of austerity. COVID compounded this, and now the bank holiday has added fuel to the fire, too. The very people who missed out the most, made sacrifices that most non-disabled folks can barely conceive, now have been dished another dose of medical trauma - all for the pomp of a public period of mourning.
Whilst much of the general public mourned the Queen,
many others were mourning the hope that their conditions were finally set to improve. Mentally, psyching yourself up for an operation can take months, so I can only imagine the pain of having it snatched away so close to the apparent finish line. There is no ethical justification in having further delayed life-improving treatments just to mourn someone who has already passed. Whether you loved the Queen and what the monarchy stands for, or you see it as a relic of a bygone colonial era, the material conditions that many ill folks are living under are surely more important. In fact, support for the monarchy overall is waning in recent years. According to polling published recently in the Guardian, less than half of young people support a monarchy; 47% even with the temporary pity boost that the institution has received in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, and 33% beforehand. Support is waning amongst older demographics too, but at a slower rate.
As disability crosses every intersect, we have to consider the impact of race and gender here too. Many of the people whose healthcare was being de-prioritised right now for deference to the Queen also have family histories of generational trauma that was inflicted in the name of the Crown, too. Statistics from 2020 reveal that women from an ethnic minority background are more likely to be disabled than their white counterparts. A study from the University of Surrey, led by Dr Emily Williams, found the following: “Those from a South Asian background, at every stage of adulthood, were more likely to experience poor physical functioning and had an increased risk of developing a physical disability than their White counterparts. This ethnic difference was most pronounced in women, with older South Asian women (over the age of 60) being four times more likely to report having a physical disability compared with older White British women of the same age. “The increased risk among South Asians could not be attributed to socioeconomic status or existing major health conditions such as diabetes, which is particularly prevalent among UK South Asian people. “Researchers also found that African Caribbean women had elevated odds of poor physical functioning compared with White British women from middle age onwards, for example, in the older group, with 75% of African Caribbean women reporting poor physical functioning compared with 57% of White British women. The research indicated that socioeconomic status and chronic conditions, in particular obesity and hypertension, may help explain some but not all of the increased risks reported by African Caribbean females.”
Nearly half of children in poverty live with a disabled relative, and one in five workers are also disabled. For every person waiting on treatments or improvement of symptoms, there is an entire support network behind them working overtime to pick up the slack and minimise their suffering until the state picks them back up. Most of us will become disabled at some point in our lives, so this affects every family in the UK in some capacity.
