It's not just the waiting lists, it's the dire situation at A&E. Folks waiting around 10 hours to be seen and ambulances parked up with patients onboard as there are no beds available for them to offload and see to the next emergency.
The NHS has effectively collapsed.
This makes GPs the backstop for all social problems in the UK, which eventually spills into the hospitals.
The example usually given is the other way round, that the woeful provision of care by the NHS leads to other public services (notably the police) becoming the backstop, e.g. for those with mental health issues.
Recently PIP payments were delayed.
Cuts to services for young people. Worsening mental health until crisis point.
Cuts to care services, leading to old people ending up in hosptial care.
All these failings compound to resulting in a medical need.
Your example of the police is where it becomes circular, as the emmergency services become the provision for other cut services.
We're about to discover the true depth of our societal issues, now that we've run out of wallpaper.
It's all top-down
Yep. A lot of people don't realise it because the loudest voices are often Brits that happen to live in locations where it has not collapsed yet, but there is basically no health service in England for a huge proportion of the population. It is only a matter of time before resources get diverted away from those locations where it still happens to be good to try and patch up the failed areas, but that won't solve the problem. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before total collapse in all locations.
Currently there is a lot of ignorance about it. People hear that it's bad but because they happen to live in an area where it happens to be good they can't really accept it. Seriously ill or dead people don't have the energy or motivation to spend time complaining about it on social media or to the press.
There is also an ideological problem for both sides. Both Labour supporters and socialists do not want to admit that the NHS is failing, because they know that if it goes then it is very unlikely to ever return, and they want to generally support nationalisation. On the other hand, Tories don't want to admit that the NHS is failing, because even for the pro-Capitalist Tories, the NHS is a patriotic symbol of the UK loved even by hardcore conservatives, and a symbol of the "blitz spirit". They also are aware of the fact that its collapse would be a sign of its own failures, since the Tories have been in power for a vast majority of the time that the NHS has been collapsing, so who else is there to blame?
I think most likely the Tories are going to try and blame this on Putin, which is quite comical.
Obviously there is this idea going around that this is being done on purpose by the Tories to encourage a move to private medicine, but I don't think this is true because the private medicine in the UK is heavily reliant on the NHS to function and the UK government aren't really doing anything at all to encourage more private hospitals to open either. If the Tories really wanted to move people from the NHS to private healthcare they would offer a statutory insurance system like in France or Germany and tell people to use it at private clinics.
Thus taking up a lot of extra beds and having a knock on effect on A&E queues etc
That and a recruitment problem - as I understand it. (Likely partly due to poor wages but that’s an assumption on my part)