The NHS and its future

[Vic]

This thread is like reading the comment section in the Daily Mail. Page after page of myth, exaggeration and untruth.


Not one poster has grasped the reason behind the current issues the NHS faces. In two words it is Andrew Lansley. His reorganisation of the NHS was one huge clusterfuck.

I will take the post from Nimrod to start
It is badly run because Lansley reorganised it in such a way the system is now so fucked up its unworkable. Nobody wanted his reforms, they were in no manifesto, so nobody voted for them, he did it anyway because he thought he knew more. He didn't he is a fucking halfwit with the brain of a cactus plant. You now have the situation where a GP controls a budget for an individual, its an ideological standpoint about patient choice. In effect what it means is that say you have to go to hospital for treatment for ulcers you have to get the bandages etc from your GP to take to hospital to have them dressed as the hospital are not permitted to use their own. The GP mindful of his budget requirements will proscribe the cheapest option, that means treatment takes longer, which means more staff time. Its false economy and it means the patient has to run back and forth between his GP, the chemist and the hospital 3 times a week to have a dressing done, rather than just have it done at source. Its fucking madness in a mad bottle with a mad hat on. A specialist will then proscribe you drugs and a GP will call you in and attempt to cut down on what the specialist wanted as it comes out of the GP budget now, not the hospitals. So you your medication is cut which means it takes longer to get better and increases the risk of you having to return to the specialist and then the whole thing starts again. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.

The missed appointments stats are made a big thing of not because more people are missing them, its because there are less appointments. Stats can easily be manipulated to show a rise when in fact fuck all has changed and people will always miss an appointment from time to time because things happen in life. The missed appointments deflect from the lack of them. Try ringing your GP for one. There aren't any because we don't have enough GPs .. It is that fucking simple. As a regular attendee at hospital outpatients I can tell you the problem is overegged. Its the lack of doctors. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.

Procurement is one I hear about a lot. I have been on the end of this waste. Phlebotomists who take your blood now use cheaper tape after taking it. They don't use plasters as they are too expensive. So now they spend far more on tape that is useless and doesn't stick but its cheap. Beancounters look at cost not value. Speak with a phlebotomist and they will tell you. At the end of the scale, an injection I need to function as a human being and type this costs £1000 a go and I have one every fortnight. So £500 per week. If I didn't have the injection I would be permantly in hospital and that costs £3,500 per week. Do the maths. Its not difficult to see which is the cheaper option. I spent two months in hospital waiting for approval for the injection because of cost. It cost over £20,000 to keep me there which would have funded my treatment for 10 months and freed up a hospital bed. Its FALSE ECONOMY.

Staff sickness is higher because there are less staff. Less staff means more work and you can only flog a horse so long before it breaks down. Hire more staff and you get less sickness. If that aint obvious I don't know what the fuck is. Nurses on my ward are doing 13 hour shifts, 13 hours caring for people who may be in danger of death. Its totally fucking insane. Nurses go sick and then because they are short they hire agency staff at 3 times the cost to cover because if they don't people will die.The agency staff will not be familiar with the ward and every ward is different in character. You need continuity of care. They are putting a cost on peoples lives. ITS FALSE ECONOMY


I see immigration mentioned as expected, health tourists blah blah fucking blah. In my combined time of nearly four years in hospital I have come across one person who was not from the UK in hospital. She was in tears and lots of pain. She had come over from Jordan on holiday and the NHS fixed her up emergency wise but they would not do the Op she needed because she didn't have insurance or any money with her. Don't buy the fucking lies you hear. Its all part of the anti immigration rhetoric. Yes we have foreign staff on our wards and foreign doctors too. Because we don't train enough Doctors, nurses etc. ITS FALSE ECONOMY. A young girl trainee nurse on my ward had to give her course up as she couldn't afford it after bursaries were cut. So she was replaced by a nurse from Ghana, a good nurse too but the English girls dream has gone and she is now probably doing fuck all. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.

Outsourcing of cleaning staff is sheer mindless fuckwittery on a scale so imbecilic I struggle to even comprehend the motive behind the thinking. The lads and girls who do it work hard bless them for the minimum wage, but they don't answer to the ward Matron. They answer to their boss. If Matron has a specific task she needs doing she has to get in touch with their boss, who gets in touch with their supervisor who gets in touch with the cleaners who then have to find time in their day to do the task. If it is a bed where somebody has passed away and it needs the full cleaning protocols then that bed could lie empty for a day. Meanwhile some poor fucker needing a bed is on a trolly in A&E waiting. The A&E staff have to look after them until the bed is ready, so the queue in A&E gets bigger because the staff are doing the job that should be done on the ward because the bed aint ready because the matron has no power over the outsourced cleaners. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.


The saddest thing is and anyone with half a brain must realise it is that the NHS is being primed to be sold off to American healthcare companies and Richard fucking Branson. The free at the point of use will be gone and people will wonder why they can no longer get treatment if they are not well off. The idiotic thing is if you have people who cant get treatment because they cant afford it the people who suffer are the people who employ them. The economy suffers and the downward spiral continues but its alright in Tory land as some of there pals have shares in private healthcare companies and they will be fine and they couldn't give two fucks about your health, you arnt important, you are lowlife scum who deserves fuck all out of life.

Im stopping now, as im getting angry. I just hope the country wakes up and sees whats happening to our NHS because in 10 years time we wont have one.

Thanks for that. Well worth your time and getting cross about.

 

[Saddleworth2]

This thread is like reading the comment section in the Daily Mail. Page after page of myth, exaggeration and untruth.


Not one poster has grasped the reason behind the current issues the NHS faces. In two words it is Andrew Lansley. His reorganisation of the NHS was one huge clusterfuck.

I will take the post from Nimrod to start
It is badly run because Lansley reorganised it in such a way the system is now so fucked up its unworkable. Nobody wanted his reforms, they were in no manifesto, so nobody voted for them, he did it anyway because he thought he knew more. He didn't he is a fucking halfwit with the brain of a cactus plant. You now have the situation where a GP controls a budget for an individual, its an ideological standpoint about patient choice. In effect what it means is that say you have to go to hospital for treatment for ulcers you have to get the bandages etc from your GP to take to hospital to have them dressed as the hospital are not permitted to use their own. The GP mindful of his budget requirements will proscribe the cheapest option, that means treatment takes longer, which means more staff time. Its false economy and it means the patient has to run back and forth between his GP, the chemist and the hospital 3 times a week to have a dressing done, rather than just have it done at source. Its fucking madness in a mad bottle with a mad hat on. A specialist will then proscribe you drugs and a GP will call you in and attempt to cut down on what the specialist wanted as it comes out of the GP budget now, not the hospitals. So you your medication is cut which means it takes longer to get better and increases the risk of you having to return to the specialist and then the whole thing starts again. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.

The missed appointments stats are made a big thing of not because more people are missing them, its because there are less appointments. Stats can easily be manipulated to show a rise when in fact fuck all has changed and people will always miss an appointment from time to time because things happen in life. The missed appointments deflect from the lack of them. Try ringing your GP for one. There aren't any because we don't have enough GPs .. It is that fucking simple. As a regular attendee at hospital outpatients I can tell you the problem is overegged. Its the lack of doctors. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.

Procurement is one I hear about a lot. I have been on the end of this waste. Phlebotomists who take your blood now use cheaper tape after taking it. They don't use plasters as they are too expensive. So now they spend far more on tape that is useless and doesn't stick but its cheap. Beancounters look at cost not value. Speak with a phlebotomist and they will tell you. At the end of the scale, an injection I need to function as a human being and type this costs £1000 a go and I have one every fortnight. So £500 per week. If I didn't have the injection I would be permantly in hospital and that costs £3,500 per week. Do the maths. Its not difficult to see which is the cheaper option. I spent two months in hospital waiting for approval for the injection because of cost. It cost over £20,000 to keep me there which would have funded my treatment for 10 months and freed up a hospital bed. Its FALSE ECONOMY.

Staff sickness is higher because there are less staff. Less staff means more work and you can only flog a horse so long before it breaks down. Hire more staff and you get less sickness. If that aint obvious I don't know what the fuck is. Nurses on my ward are doing 13 hour shifts, 13 hours caring for people who may be in danger of death. Its totally fucking insane. Nurses go sick and then because they are short they hire agency staff at 3 times the cost to cover because if they don't people will die.The agency staff will not be familiar with the ward and every ward is different in character. You need continuity of care. They are putting a cost on peoples lives. ITS FALSE ECONOMY


I see immigration mentioned as expected, health tourists blah blah fucking blah. In my combined time of nearly four years in hospital I have come across one person who was not from the UK in hospital. She was in tears and lots of pain. She had come over from Jordan on holiday and the NHS fixed her up emergency wise but they would not do the Op she needed because she didn't have insurance or any money with her. Don't buy the fucking lies you hear. Its all part of the anti immigration rhetoric. Yes we have foreign staff on our wards and foreign doctors too. Because we don't train enough Doctors, nurses etc. ITS FALSE ECONOMY. A young girl trainee nurse on my ward had to give her course up as she couldn't afford it after bursaries were cut. So she was replaced by a nurse from Ghana, a good nurse too but the English girls dream has gone and she is now probably doing fuck all. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.

Outsourcing of cleaning staff is sheer mindless fuckwittery on a scale so imbecilic I struggle to even comprehend the motive behind the thinking. The lads and girls who do it work hard bless them for the minimum wage, but they don't answer to the ward Matron. They answer to their boss. If Matron has a specific task she needs doing she has to get in touch with their boss, who gets in touch with their supervisor who gets in touch with the cleaners who then have to find time in their day to do the task. If it is a bed where somebody has passed away and it needs the full cleaning protocols then that bed could lie empty for a day. Meanwhile some poor fucker needing a bed is on a trolly in A&E waiting. The A&E staff have to look after them until the bed is ready, so the queue in A&E gets bigger because the staff are doing the job that should be done on the ward because the bed aint ready because the matron has no power over the outsourced cleaners. ITS FALSE ECONOMY.


The saddest thing is and anyone with half a brain must realise it is that the NHS is being primed to be sold off to American healthcare companies and Richard fucking Branson. The free at the point of use will be gone and people will wonder why they can no longer get treatment if they are not well off. The idiotic thing is if you have people who cant get treatment because they cant afford it the people who suffer are the people who employ them. The economy suffers and the downward spiral continues but its alright in Tory land as some of there pals have shares in private healthcare companies and they will be fine and they couldn't give two fucks about your health, you arnt important, you are lowlife scum who deserves fuck all out of life.

Im stopping now, as im getting angry. I just hope the country wakes up and sees whats happening to our NHS because in 10 years time we wont have one.

What an extraordinarily articulate rant. Well done and thanks. I agree with every word.

 

[talkativesprout]

Don't know what the mark up on medicines is but a £17bn a yr bill could be dramatically cut by investment in the production of our own medicine.

 

[Blue Maverick]

My wife tried to see a doctor yesterday at her GPs she was told they’ve were short because of Ramadan at 10am She had to see a pharmacist who then needed advice off a doctor who then sent her to walk in centre who then assessed her who then said she had to ring 111 who then said she had to see a GP who then gave her a prescription she got her antibiotics at 930pm. A fucking joke, I bet if she was in the House of Commons she’d have been seen by 10.01am.

 

[The Light Was Yellow Sir]

National Health Service (Co-Funding and Co-Payment) Bill 2017-19 gets its second reading today. It’s a private members bill, with no detail on what co-funding means. It’s proposer is one Sir Christopher Chope, seconded by Peter Bone. Chope is a lovely man and I am sure he is not up to no good. After all, he steered the poll tax through the commons, voted against; the minimum wage, against pardoning Alan Turing, against companies producing equal pay information and talked of staff in the HOC being ‘servants’. He also called for the minimum wage to be abolished saying it would introduce “more freedom in the job market”. When the Hillsborough debate was starting in 2011, he raised an objection as he believed that a debate on MPs pensions should take precedence. In the expenses scandal he claimed over £135,000 which included nearly £1000 for a repair to a sofa. He has also managed to filibuster, or talk out, bills on; revenge evictions by landlords (funnily enough, he is a landlord), wild animals not being used in circuses and, here is a clue about his bill possibly, restrictions on parking charges for carers. I put this information to suggest that his co-payment bill is unlikely to be good news for anyone lacking ‘in a few quid’. We do already have co-payments in the form of eye test charges and prescription charges. As I have already said, there is no detail on what he is proposing but things like; faster access to treatment, an appointment when you want it, parking at the front of the hospital, paying extra for higher standards of food, paying to see a GP, paying to jump the queue for a consultant appointment, part paying for expensive drugs not available on the NHS? Truth is, I have no idea but, looking at the proposer, it’s unlikely to be ‘good news’. By way of contrast, the bills seconder Peter Bone, believes the NHS should be privatised and is only applicable to ‘Stalinist Russia’.
As it’s a private members bill, I know it would need government support to get anywhere, but you do have to wonder why it is out there? Is it a ‘raise it up the flag pole and see how many salute it’ proposal, a way to test it out if you will? Or, is it two very right wing than nutters with nothing better to do?

 

[Ifwecouldjust.......]

More money isnt the answer
Its just badly run

Procurement is a massive rip off
People not turning up for appointments is a huge problem
Staff sickness costs way more than private industry levels.

its not badly run at the lower levels.... my wife has had to have treatment for a serious illness over the last few years and the NHS has been absolutely amazing.Staff (inc Consultants) going out of their way to explain procedures / possible outcomes. Even coming to find us because we were late for an appointment because the previous department were in a backlog.

Procurement I understand is a problem and to be honest this is where the Govt should spend its efforts negotiating for the entire NHS rather than allowing each trust to negotiate themselves. (but they wont do that because its in their interests not to)

I have NEVER in the last two / three years whilst sat in a GP's surgery or hospital waiting area heard someones name called out and that person fail to attend their appointment. Like wise I have NEVER been called early because the people who should be in front of us have failed to turn up (its usually the opposite) despite the fact that the Mrs insists that we are at least 1/2 hour early for every appointment.

We have a friend who's a nurse and i would say she's rarely if ever off work and in fact does more hours than she should (at the end of her shift she waits for the replacement team and then provides a brief and update on the status of each patient .... thats unpaid )

I recently attended A&E on a sunday because i had stood on a nail that had gone right through my foot. I waited 4 hours for an injection but to be fair that was ok as people who were coming in needed A&E far more than i did.

Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Mail or see on '24 hours in A&E' this is nothing more than propaganda to deflect and place blame on people (bit like Benefit Street) which is what the Tories are good at.

To finish......

The NHS is awesome and we should fight like hell to retain it... they are being deprived of income for a reason (an idealogical one at that).

 

[Fred_Quimby]

I never forget that it is free. We have been to hospital several times recently and have had great service. People not turning up doesn't appear to be a problem as everyone appeared to be seen ok but when people don't turn up they have to be booked in again.

My main points are

a) if we are short of doctors and nurses where are their wages being spent if the NHS is short of money?

b) I know the government are "spending more on the NHS than ever before" but is the spending per person going up?

My daughter spent 3 years becoming a paediatric nurse and left after a year at Manchester Children's, little or no breaks, supposed to be have 3 days on 4 off but short staff meant she was going in more often for no extra pay. She collapsed on the ward and said enough and left the profession. She was working 13 hours a day.

 

[the god Gerry Gow]

I know this isn’t going to be popular but at some stage, sooner rather than later, the country as a whole is going to have to take difficult decisions about the NHS.

I do not believe we can continue to just pump more and more money into it.

Costs are going to rise and as people live longer and longer it is a victim of its own success. Many many people are alive today who even 15 years ago would not have survived.

 

[Eaglechief]

I know this isn’t going to be popular but at some stage, sooner rather than later, the country as a whole is going to have to take difficult decisions about the NHS.

I do not believe we can continue to just pump more and more money into it.

Costs are going to rise and as people live longer and longer it is a victim of its own success. Many many people are alive today who even 15 years ago would not have survived.

The NHS as it currently stands is the cheapest way to provide healthcare for the vast majority of the UK's citizens.

Sure there will always be issues with needing to improve efficiency, part of which is due to having to incorporate ever changing new technology for equipment and drugs, leading to changes in procedures and how and where they are delivered to citizens etc.

Introducing a profit motive into the healthcare system directly will just lead to more expensive care for virtually the same service/product (or most likely, more expensive care with even less choice).

The NHS is one of the most cheapest and efficient services compared to universal healthcare systems around the industrialized world, unfortunately our government doesn't give a shit about it for ideological reasons.

 

[blue44]

Staff sickness is higher because there are less staff. Less staff means more work and you can only flog a horse so long before it breaks down. Hire more staff and you get less sickness. If that aint obvious I don't know what the fuck is. Nurses on my ward are doing 13 hour shifts, 13 hours caring for people who may be in danger of death. Its totally fucking insane. Nurses go sick and then because they are short they hire agency staff at 3 times the cost to cover because if they don't people will die.The agency staff will not be familiar with the ward and every ward is different in character. You need continuity of care. They are putting a cost on peoples lives. ITS FALSE ECONOMY

I work in the NHS and thats true to certain degree,but the sickness levels are down to one simple reason in my opinion,we are all paid when we are off ,full pay up to 6 months,half after 6 months!.Even my weekend enhancements are paid if Im off saturday and sunday.Iv worked in it for 10 years now and before i was in private jobs etc,nobody every stayed off unless you were actually poorly because you only got statutary sick pay which is similar to unemployment benefit,where i work its the same old people that exploit it year after year,and nobody seems to do anything about them,which leads to other staff members that don't do it getting more and more dismayed and frustrated etc.I'm on band 1 btw

Cracking rant though