Overwhelming The NHS

I mistakenly published 2 days worth of blogs yesterday. Mea culpa! 

We keep hearing about the imminent collapse of the NHS, but what does that mean?

The NHS is like a water pump that usually works at a constant speed. Occasionally it speeds up slightly; occasionally it slows down a bit, depending on government tinkering. 

The problems occur, however, when the water it's being asked to shift increases beyond its capability. The pump still continues working away at its design capacity, but the build-up of water requiring to be pumped just grows and grows. The pump doesn't actually break down or fail - the metric of collapse occurs outside of the system.

There is no precise point at which we can say the NHS has been overwhelmed - it's a function of the queues that build up, and adjusting the metrics of permissible queue length can give the semblance of everything moving along without a problem.

Queues are building up and there are now 5.7m people waiting for operations, and the waiting list is growing - by any reasonable metric, the NHS has already been overwhelmed, but you wouldn't know it, as it just keeps limping along like Monty Python's Black Knight - although the Black Knight is not a valid analogy, as the Black Knight becomes incapable of functioning at all, whereas the NHS will keep functioning, but not fulfilling its full intention. A better analogy is a bus service which has too many customers and capacity isn't increased.

Staff absences are at record levels and staff are leaving in their droves through burnout, thus the NHS is now not even operating at design capacity, exacerbating the growing queues - it's severely wounded.

The following image is of a robot arm that was programmed to recoup leaking hydraulic fluid so as to stop it from 'dying'.

It was an art installation and the hydraulic fluid was dyed to make it look like blood. Created in 2016 by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, they named the piece, 'Can't Help Myself' and it finally ran out of oil and died in 2019. This could be a metaphor for the NHS.