In the years after Labour came to power in 1997, NHS healthcare improved rapidly. Waiting lists came down, we were offered a greater choice of providers through a new Choose and Book scheme and walk-in centres were set up, meaning patients could be seen on the day in the community for urgent health problems. But no more.

No one can fail to have noticed the decline in NHS healthcare provision in England in recent years: long waits to see a GP for routine appointments; more GP consultations over the phone instead of face-to-face; even longer waits for outpatient appointments and services such as physiotherapy – up to 12 months where I live (honestly what is the use of that?); the substitution of physician associates for doctors; long hours of corridor care in A&E; and, most worryingly, an increase in medical errors. It is primarily these medical errors that have prompted me to write this piece.

Over the past decade we have seen an increasing number of health scandals come to light, especially, but not exclusively, in maternity care. Despite several high-profile maternity reviews by eminent clinicians over the past decade, these failings continue, with multiple NHS Hospitals Trusts now having been implicated and investigated, including at Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent, Leeds, Oxford and Gloucestershire NHS Hospital Trusts.

It also takes the NHS far too long to weed out poor practice. A leaked Royal College of Surgeons’ report on a surgeon who performed poor surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is said to have criticised the hospital’s lower limb reconstruction service as not “safe for patients” with the orthopaedic department being “dysfunctional”. And this hospital is supposed to be a national centre of excellence! Surely, after a certain number of poorly performed operations, alarm bells should be ringing and matters quickly taken in hand? An independent review found in this case, that 94 children and young people had come to harm at GOSH due to the surgeon in question, 13 of whom had life-long injuries according to the initial review by the RCS. There have been similar stories in the media down the years, including that of disgraced surgeon Ian Paterson, who performed unnecessary or botched surgery on more than a thousand women. But is poor practice still going under the radar and is it still too hard for NHS whistleblowers to come forward? Also concerning is the increasing number of ‘never events’ in surgery. For example, cases of wrong-site surgery in England rose from 69 in 2020 to 101 in 2025, with 7% involving serious harm to patients. Still low numbers yes – but devastating for those involved.

So, while the NHS performs some fantastic, life-saving treatment after heart attacks and strokes and wonderful cancer care, this cannot disguise the fact that too many medical errors are occurring. Commenting on a report published at the end of 2024 by Imperial College London, the distinguished physician Lord Darzi said there had been “alarming declines” in 12 key metrics of patient safety in England since 2022. This included in maternity care as mentioned above, with rising rates of stillbirths, babies dying during or soon after birth, and women dying during labour – with higher rates of harm amongst some ethnicities. There were also regional differences: the impacts of the adverse effects of medical treatment causing death or disability were found to be twice as high in the North-East of England than in Greater London. The report found that the NHS spends £14.7bn a year treating patients in England who need follow up care because of NHS’ errors – around 7.5% of the current annual NHS budget. That money could pay for a lot of additional doctors and nurses.

In terms of lives lost through inadequate resourcing of A&E departments, a devastating report by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine published in June 2026, conservatively estimated that, in 2025 alone, there were nearly 16,000 excess deaths associated with long waiting times (the equivalent figure was only 1,657 a decade previously). A similar report published this year, based on University of Glasgow research, estimated that there were 550 excess deaths a week in A&E departments in England, Wales and Northern Ireland due to overcrowding – equivalent to a staggering 28,000 excess deaths a year. Last month the Lib Dems took a stance on challenging NHS corridor care and Helen Morgan MP must continue to flag up Lib Dem policy on this (a £1.5bn plan to end corridor care in 12 months) as we approach the winter months.

Finally, medication errors are regrettably also too commonplace. A recent study by researchers at Manchester, Sheffield and York Universities revealed that an estimated 237 million medication errors occur in the NHS in England every year, including around 66 million incidents with the potential to cause clinically significant harm. Their research found that adverse drug reactions (ADRs) could be a contributory factor to between 1,700 and 22,303 deaths a year in England.

In conclusion, is safe NHS care becoming too much of a lottery? And if so, what checks and balances, treatment protocols and additional financial and staffing resources urgently need to be put in place to reduce unnecessary deaths and harm to patients? We should remember that each of the statistics cited here represent real people – either patients who may be struggling to overcome errors made in their care, or, in the worst-case scenario, families grieving the, potentially avoidable, loss of their loved ones.

* Judy Abel is a Lib Dem member who has worked in health policy for several major health charities. (She is still working)