Imagine you had a job that you love doing – but year after year, the hours get longer, the size and complexity of the workload gets greater, the pay doesn’t really improve, and you see your colleagues leave without being replaced. On top of that, you have to give up more of your life outside of work, while morale in your workplace sinks and mistakes creep in.

This is life working in the NHS. And it doesn’t end there. Imagine you then see another job opportunity advertised. It has a controlled workload with sociable and predictable hours (because the NHS cannot control the volume or timing of patient demand), an easier mix of patients to care for (the private sector can “cherry-pick” the less needy patients), better pay (private hospitals do not have the overheads of running A&E departments), and less risk of verbal or physical abuse because these patients are happier. Do you take it?

It is a complete fallacy that by using a private service you are relieving the NHS of a little bit of their workload

For all the talk of Donald Trump acquiring the NHS in a trade deal and headline-grabbing, multimillion-pound procurements for private companies, this is one of the most insidious and immediate ways privatisation is affecting our universal healthcare system – by poaching staff from their NHS jobs. Private hospitals, private diagnostic testing services, private general practices and other privately run services are creating a vicious cycle of detriment. It is a major contributor to the some 100,000 vacancies currently in the NHS today.

This is my professional view based on my extensive senior commissioning experience in the NHS. As a result, I strongly encourage people not to use private healthcare services. I ask people to think carefully about the impact of prioritising themselves at a high cost to not only other people who do rely on the NHS, but to their future selves who may rely on the NHS one day because they have an accident or emergency, or become really quite unwell, or can no longer afford to pay privately.

It is a complete fallacy that by using a private service you are relieving the NHS of a little bit of their workload – every nurse or doctor that “defects” to treat private patients could have cared for many more (and needier) NHS patients in a given year.

And it’s not just a case of wealthier patients. Increasingly, those who have operations and diagnostic tests at private hospitals are not “self-funders”. They are NHS patients who were sent there by the NHS because their local hospital is struggling to manage the demand and backlog of patients on the waiting list. The NHS is a significant consumer of many private healthcare services. Although exact figures are hard to determine, the NHS spent £9.2bn on services delivered by the private sector in the last financial year.

Under pressure to meet targets and avoid harm coming to patients while they wait for unacceptably long periods, there is a government diktat that NHS GPs and hospitals should offer private operations and tests to patients on the waiting list. And why are so many hospitals struggling with waiting times so severely and so frequently these days? Lack of staff.

This is all an act of self-harm, bolstering the profit margins of the private sector and sending away with the patients those very staff who would have contributed to resolving the waiting times in the NHS. More and more private healthcare providers are springing up, seeing a great commercial opportunity.

If left unchecked, it is difficult to see a long-term future for the NHS. It is buckling under extreme workforce shortages not with every year that passes, but now, with every month. This is not a problem that can be solved with money alone. Even if the government commits additional millions to recruitment, as it has done in recent years albeit with non-recurrent monies, this is not going to magic up 100,000 ready-to-serve, genuinely additional staff within the next year or two.

The country needs to recognise that staff retention is the NHS’s top priority. We need to listen to and understand thoroughly why doctors, nurses and others are leaving or reducing their work in the NHS. It is not because all of a sudden they do not believe in the ethos or noble work of the NHS any more. It is because they cannot continue without jeopardising their own wellbeing, and that feels both unjust and irrational if we believe, cross-party, that the life of the NHS is worth saving.

I implore anyone who uses private healthcare to be aware that they are effectively privatising the NHS by doing so. I also call for a repeal of the government’s obligation for clinical commissioning groups and hospitals to send NHS patients to private providers in a superficial effort to reduce long waiting lists. A policy change is needed to stop these vicious cycles and the burgeoning opportunistic growth of private providers, who will not be there for us “from cradle to grave”, and especially not when we are in greatest need.

• Jessica Arnold is an associate director for an NHS Clinical Commissioning Group and has held a number of senior roles in the NHS and public services across London and the north-west