In 2025, campaign group EveryDoctor is stepping up its work to save the NHS from privatisation, and build a functioning, flourishing healthcare system for patients and staff alike.
However, there’s work to do. The group wants to grow its following from thousands, to a vibrant patient and staff community of millions. It feels it will take nothing short of this to turn things around because:
millions of people are currently being profoundly failed by politicians
In short, the group aims to transform its campaign community into something more: a movement.
Its ambitious goal comes amidst another spate of alarming news stories over the appalling state of things in the NHS. What’s more, EveryDoctor founder (and Canary columnist) Julia Grace Patterson has crunched the numbers on patient deaths – and the situation is actually worse than the headlines suggest.
NHS privatisation: exacting a devastating toll
By the close of 2024, and into the New Year already, the media has been awash with dire developments in the NHS.
A ‘quad-demic’ storm of influenza, Covid, norovirus, and RSV has been overwhelming NHS hospitals across the country. More than a dozen hospitals have now declared “critical incidents” as hospitalisations mount up, and services are swamped.
Meanwhile, headlines abound about intractable wait times, and lack of available beds. Patients entering NHS hospitals face a disgraceful situation – first a major problem during the Covid pandemic – but now tragically commonplace. The phrase “corridor care” has firmly cemented itself into the British vernacular.
In December, 54,000 patients waited on trolleys longer than 12 hours for hospitals to admit them to wards.
EveryDoctor’s Patterson has laid out the devastating cost of all this in a Tiktok video. Specifically, she analysed the Royal College of General Medicine (RCEM)’s statistics showing the toll long wait times have been having. Horrifyingly, she highlighted that almost 300 patient deaths a week can be linked to long waits.
In short, this atrocious state of affairs is putting patients’ lives at risk.
Political failures mount as more privatisation incoming
So, as all these crises in the NHS unfold, the Labour government has answered with yet more plans for privatising the public healthcare system. EveryDoctor wrote to its supporters on the situation that:
This government released big plans for the NHS last week, and those plans involved further privatisation.
This government has failed to invest properly in emergency services, and patients in A and E departments are receiving urgent treatment in corridors.
Its latest foray into opening the NHS up to further backdoor privatisation comes in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
As the Canary’s James Wright highlighted, AI companies likely had a little help from science and technology secretary Peter Kyle. Also an acting vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Kyle has repeatedly rubbed shoulders with a who’s who of AI’s most prolific lobbyists. Given this, Wright pointed out that Kyle likely had a hand in this latest NHS AI privatisation manoeuvre.
Of course, all this is barely the tip of the iceberg of privatisation’s manifold fallouts for the NHS.
Therefore, turning things around in the NHS will take a momentous groundswell of action. And it’s why Patterson and the EveryDoctor team have declared their intention to build a bold movement to “fearlessly” fight back.
EveryDoctor: ‘we need to think a lot bigger’
Since 2019, EveryDoctor has been campaigning against this unrelenting tide of private profiteering in the UK’s health service. The group has put out critical research on NHS privatisation. It has met with MPs, and created far-reaching public awareness campaigns.
Most recently, it ran a powerful campaign to engage MPs with a doctor-led manifesto for fixing the NHS. Alongside volunteers and the public, the group brought these ideas to 117 MPs and their teams.
However, Patterson lamented how to date, none of it has yet been enough. So she spelled out that:
we need to think a lot bigger now. Much, much bigger. We need millions of people to know what we’re doing and to stand together with us to fight for the NHS.
In just the first two weeks of 2025, EveryDoctor has already set a number of things in motion. The group has called on the Liberal Democrats to collaborate in holding the Labour government to account for the emergency situation in A&E departments. It is also organising urgent meetings with MPs about this too.
And EveryDoctor has started the year off with a social media bang too. The Tiktok video Patterson posted on the RCEM statistics went viral. Off the back of this, NHS staff, film-makers, and members of the public have been flooding the group’s inbox with offers of support.
EveryDoctor: time to build a movement
Of course, this is only the start. EveryDoctor has many more plans in the works for the year ahead. Patterson set out to supporters that:
There is only a point to our campaigning if we do it fearlessly, relentlessly, boldly, and loudly. I can only lead EveryDoctor if I will do it fearlessly. So that’s what I am going to do – that’s what we are going to do. I went back to TikTok this morning and continued making videos. We’re starting daily YouTube videos this week. We’re hiring into our team. We’re completing our research into the financial links between MPs and the private healthcare sector. And we have so much more to do…
Going forward, she hopes that many more people will join EveryDoctor’s community to work together in saving the NHS for the millions that depend on it.
You can keep up with EveryDoctor’s vital work by joining its WhatsApp community. The group is also fundraising to ramp up the reach and impact of all its upcoming plans. If you’re in a position to donate, you can do so here.
Featured image via EveryDoctor
