Happy 75th Birthday

[threespires]

Just get the politicians out of it. Create a health agency with a chairman, a board and execs who know what they are doing. Example: What on earth is a minister doing negotiating wages Ffs? What relevant skills and experience does he have?
You last paragraph gives the lie to your first sentence.

I think that's fair comment, the same applies to education too. I can't see politicians of any current hue being prepared to give up that power, the current lot are obsessed with centralising control and decision making (alongside private enterprise) and I don't know that the others would roll that mindset back. I'd probably vote for a party that explicitly said they would depoliticise both of those areas.

 

[kaz7]

The staff are brilliant , my journey through several depts over the years has been faultless , they are over worked and under paid and leaving in droves , that is the core problem, staff retention and filling all the vacancies . Brexit and this harsh line on immigrants is killing the service that was built on immigrant workers , nobody can sort it out , austerity is also killing the service

 

[KS55]

The staff are brilliant , my journey through several depts over the years has been faultless , they are over worked and under paid and leaving in droves , that is the core problem, staff retention and filling all the vacancies . Brexit and this harsh line on immigrants is killing the service that was built on immigrant workers , nobody can sort it out , austerity is also killing the service

We gave several countries a promise not to recruit their health staff but I’m not sure we honoured that. Surely the answer is to recruit more at home, provided the wages offered are better.

 

[metalblue]

Having worked for them, I have a fully formed view. Scale is not the issue, but culture is which is why you need to bin the polititians.

It ain’t the politicians that makes Mrs MB role as a breast care specialist nurse as inefficient as it is. On the surface the service is amazing from diagnosis to surgery usually takes 2 weeks but behind the scenes is a different kettle of fish.

 

[kinkyblue]

How many trained doctors and nurses to we lose to private practice? After training is there a minimum amount of time they have to commit to the NHS?

 

[I'm With Stupid]

I think that's fair comment, the same applies to education too. I can't see politicians of any current hue being prepared to give up that power, the current lot are obsessed with centralising control and decision making (alongside private enterprise) and I don't know that the others would roll that mindset back. I'd probably vote for a party that explicitly said they would depoliticise both of those areas.

Independent decision making only works if it goes hand-in-hand with an adequate budget though. One of the Tories' flagship policies was more powers to local authorities, and I'm sure on paper and in law, they delivered that. And then they slashed everyone's budget to the point where the only decision they could make was whether to collect the bins every other week or every three weeks.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

How many trained doctors and nurses to we lose to private practice? After training is there a minimum amount of time they have to commit to the NHS?

Probably about the same amount of time that all of the Indian and Filipino doctors and nurses have to commit after their training before being poached by the UK.

Incidentally, it's also one of the main problems with transferring more and more of the training costs onto the individual students. If my government has made me go tens of thousands of pounds into debt to become a doctor, why would I feel like I owe them anything?

 

[KS55]

It ain’t the politicians that makes Mrs MB role as a breast care specialist nurse as inefficient as it is. On the surface the service is amazing from diagnosis to surgery usually takes 2 weeks but behind the scenes is a different kettle of fish.

This very week we have politiclans fighting over whether a reorganisation is desirable or necessary. Makes the rags look like a smart operation.

 

[Deleted member 77198]

It is not the envy of the world.

I used to live beside a nice Greek family. They said they loved it in Britain but they thought the health service is awful. That was the stand-out bad thing about this country and that’s the general impression of Britain in other countries.

I’ve had a fair bit of experience of having to access the NHS. NHS staff are great, hard working and caring people from what I’ve experienced. But by fuck do they get a lot of things wrong (probably from being understaffed, underpaid, overstretched and overworked).

I have some bad experiences and have heard of others having worse experiences with the NHS.

I had blood clots on my lungs that started in September last year which I was hospitalised with in October. I was hospitalised for a second time in January, and they admitted to me that they’d had me on the wrong medication for three months and that’s why I wasn’t getting better. These blood clots could have killed me at any point.

I had to be kept in hospital for two days a few years ago due to a severe ear infection. When the Nurse put the needle in to put a drip into me, my blood spurted out all over the bed and the floor as the Nurse had to have two goes at it. Yet that blood was not cleaned up the whole time I was in there (36 hours).

I was in A&E in September and a woman threw up all over the floor of the waiting room - it was a proper pints of chunder all over the place. Nobody came to clean it up for 45 minutes. That was a smelly, horrible 45 minutes of my 14 HOUR wait to be seen!

My Mother had to have some blood taken at the MRI a few years ago. At her appointment to get the results she was informed they’d lost the blood sample she gave and that she needed to go to Trafford General to have another blood sample taken. Instead of being informed of this before taking the time to go to the MRI, she wasn’t informed until the actual appointment and was told she’ll have to book an appointment at a different hospital across the other side of the city that she couldn’t get booked in for another SIX WEEKS! In the meantime, what had happened to her initial blood sample? It could have been used in someone else’s diagnosis for all we know.

A friend’s daughter has a lung disease and she’s had years of appointments being cancelled. Despite this disease getting worse, the hospital have stopped rescheduling these appointments and have told them to go back to the GP to book another one. What fucking warped way of working is this?! Why can’t she book the appointment through the department she’s supposed to be using at the hospital? It makes no sense at all that she has to go back to the GP at the local Dr’s surgery to book the appointment at the hospital? What’s going on?!

A lad I went to university with was meant to have an operation on his leg but they gave him the wrong operation and removed a lot of his calf muscle which was an operation meant for another patient.

And this is just from what I know as an individual, how many bad stories could you collate from every citizen on this island? We all make mistakes but, from what I’ve seen from the NHS, they happen far too often. And unfathomable things occur with no reasoning.

It’s not good enough.

 

[KS55]

Is it the model or is it simply the level of investment? This is a good read.

How does UK health spending compare across Europe over the past decade?

Icaro Rebolledo and Anita Charlesworth use five charts to compare UK health care spending with EU countries before the pandemic.

www.health.org.uk

That report is a decent summary. Germany is a stand out example; not all in their garden is wonderful but there are some key differences to UK.
— German funding is largely through insurance rather than tax.
— Hospitals are provided by a range of organisations such as local authorities, insurance companies, charities etc. There is nothing similar to NHS trusts.
— Patients have to pay for their drugs and meals while in hospital.
—GPs in Germany are paid much less than here.
— For Day to day treatment patients have to buy their prescriptions and, I think, pay a fee for a visit to a GP.
You can see from these few facts that German healthcare is organised completely differently to the UK and this may account for the difference in budgets. Germany is currently grappling with insurance premiums that are for ever rising but still fall short of what is needed to maintain current budgets.