NHS and what the Tories did

I have copied and pasted this article from the Observer.

Britain was hit far harder by the Covid-19 pandemic than other developed countries because the NHS had been “seriously weakened” by disastrous government policies over the preceding decade, a wide-ranging report will conclude this week.
An assessment of the NHS by the world-renowned surgeon Prof Ara Darzi, commissioned in July by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, will find that the health service reduced its “routine healthcare activity by a far greater percentage than other health systems” in many key areas during the Covid crisis.
Hip and knee replacements, for instance, fell by 46% and 68% respectively. Hospital discharges as a whole dropped by 18% between 2019 and 2020 in the UK compared with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 10%, Lord Darzi will say.
In a key section of his report, the crossbench peer will also conclude that the NHS is still suffering the aftereffects of its inability to respond adequately to the Covid shock at the time.
“The state of the NHS today cannot be understood without recognising quite how much care was cancelled, discontinued, or postponed during the pandemic … The pandemic’s impact was magnified because the NHS had been seriously weakened in the decade preceding its onset.”

Darzi will be particularly critical of former Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley’s top-down reorganisation of the NHS under David Cameron’s prime ministership, which he will say “scorched the earth for health reform”.
“The Health and Social Care Act of 2012 was a calamity without international precedent – it proved disastrous,” Darzi will say, adding: “The result of the disruption was a permanent loss of capability from the NHS … This is an important part of the explanation for the deterioration in performance of the NHS as a whole.
“Rather than liberating the NHS, as it had promised, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 imprisoned more than a million NHS staff in a broken system for the best part of a decade.”