The NHS

[Rascal]

Dare to criticize the NHS and you get 9 pages of irate posters. It's utterly bizarre.

I can of nothing else which is so obviously flawed and yet which stirs up such passionate support. It's very very odd.

I answered you and I am prepared to spend all day debating this with you, I am not irate, I am not bizarre, I just know more than the generalisations you bandy about.

Please tell me your specific criticisms and I will address them.

Yes I am passionate about the NHS, no that is not odd, I believe a persons health is of paramount importance.

So lets start, a point at a time if you like. Fire away.

 

[joe123]

Dare to criticize the NHS and you get 9 pages of irate posters. It's utterly bizarre.

I can of nothing else which is so obviously flawed and yet which stirs up such passionate support. It's very very odd.

I think whilst there's no doubt it's flawed, it's still done an incredible amount of good and most of us probably have the NHS to thank for free care provided to a loved one, hence the passionate defence. The problem is with both the level of funding, but crucially how it's spent and service administered. So whilst we have amongst the lowest proportion of GDP spent on health service in big economies, at one point recently, the NHS was the biggest users of fax machines in the developed world. It's a fair argument to say the service needs modernising, but that shouldn't overlook the great things the NHS do.

 

[Ancient Citizen]

Thankfully, I've never had to use it often, but when I have, for me personally, it's been excellent.
The wife has had to use it an awful lot though, and again, broadly it's served her well.
What I will criticise though, and someone may be able to justify this criticism, is when I was younger, nurses.
of both sexes, looked like they worked a lot harder than those I see now, I've regularly seen groups sat around chatting at desks,
whilst auxiliaries are slaving away cleaning, comforting, and chatting to bedridden patients. Also, the number of
obese nurses now is frightening, I don't know how they're going to convince folk to lose weight, if they are massively
overweight themselves.

 

[toffee balls]

I wonder why designing and implementing an integrated computer system is so elusive?
Other sectors of. Industry have been streamlined by such measures so what is it that is so special about the project?

Nail on head.

My sister in law is at a very high level of management in the NHS.

As a family we have spent pretty much the last 3 years watching the deterioration and ultimate passing of my elderly mother.
The care , compassion and friendship she received from the nurses and doctors and all the staff at Stepping Hill and The Christie has been nothing short of amazing and extremely moving. I can honestly say I am very proud of our NHS and you can see why it is envied accross most of the world.

Coming to the point , her opinion is that the interaction between all medical departments is being sevely disrupted by the lack of an intergrated computer system.
It is not a simple fix this one in any shape or form and would also be massively affected by our personal data protection laws.
It is the one thing that stood out for me .Generally it seems each department has literally no bloody idea what another may have found or what has been treated previously.
It is both very frustrating and equally alarming.

 

[remember arthur mann]

The demise of the NHS came about after the introduction of the private management teams, they did their job, now it is mortally wounded, still being drained of it's resources.

 

[stonerblue]

Then all I can say is that you've experienced a very different level of care and attention that I did not when I came to rely on the NHS for treatment and healthcare.

I do trust your family is well and on the mend and hope that they recover soon with no complications.

Nice one mb. Unfortunately there's no 'recovering' for the wife so we will be relying on the nhs to make her life liveable until she croaks. Hence my desire to see the service remain healthy.
We have spent the last 2 weeks trying to get a blood test at Hope but they are down to the bare bones staff wise and have just phoned to say get doctor to do it. The one MS nurse at the hospital is now sorting this out, on his day off.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Prior to about 2010, I think the figure is accurate. They did the best given the knowledge and equipment given to them. I'm not making this political btw, it's simply post the crash.

Post 2010, we've have had to reduce the deficit at a time where medicine is exponentially increasing in complexity and is at the mercy of private drug companies investing a huge amount in R&D to keep ahead of the game.

If we are ever to actually Brexit, then I really hope we put all our skills in AI, medical machinery and drug development.

These three things are going to be huge moving forwards and if the NHS is to survive, then we need drug development and medical machinery to be at the forefront of our national business.

The NHS has never been perfect, but MRSA is harshnto blame on them as it was an unknown disease until diagnosed and was dealt with as best they could.

Surgical errors will always be made, whether NHS or private. I guess you could sue for more if done privately? (The suing culture has a lot to answer for too btw)

The rest of what your post implies is down to either mismanagement, lack of education or lack of funds.

Waiting times in A&E are down to a lack of doctors, lack of GPs and/or a lack of education. For example, If you have some sort of rash that looks like it could be meningitis, you'd ring your GP, they'd say they can't see you till 3 weeks on Wednesday. At that point, you'd ring NHS direct; they'd talk it through with you and advise you to go to A&E as they can't take the risk of you dying following your phone call.

GPs are retiring as soon as they can as they've had too much legal responsibility put on them. They can only refer people to the next level of specialist. That could take months/years. If they misdiagnose then they are culprable. They also need to invest heavily in their practice to make it sustainable.

Crazy times we are living in.

Without going over every line above, I'm not trying to suggest that all of the NHS' failings are of its own making. The issue is, what are the failings and how can we improve performance where it is lacking. Of course I agree that much of it is down to funding and that although the NHS budget has never been higher, costs have also never been higher and there's always a need for more funds.

But as it stands, you can barely make such suggestions without getting your head bitten off. Look at my opening post on this thread and the response it got! I merely called it out as I see it; that in absolute terms, our NHS is not performing as well as it could, nor as well as other national health services in other countries.

On a small point, c.difficile was rife throughout Bristol hospitals maybe 10 years ago, with countless outbreaks and special isolation wards for those affected. Yet in the local Bupa hospital - now run by Spire, and quite a big facility - they had precisely zero cases of c.diff. Maybe this was coincidence, but also maybe it's because the hygene standards in our public hospitals - which if going by the amount of detritus you see on the floor every day appears to be terrible - is actually terrible.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Nail on head.

My sister in law is at a very high level of management in the NHS.

As a family we have spent pretty much the last 3 years watching the deterioration and ultimate passing of my elderly mother.
The care , compassion and friendship she received from the nurses and doctors and all the staff at Stepping Hill and The Christie has been nothing short of amazing and extremely moving. I can honestly say I am very proud of our NHS and you can see why it is envied accross most of the world.

Coming to the point , her opinion is that the interaction between all medical departments is being sevely disrupted by the lack of an intergrated computer system.
It is not a simple fix this one in any shape or form and would also be massively affected by our personal data protection laws.
It is the one thing that stood out for me .Generally it seems each department has literally no bloody idea what another may have found or what has been treated previously.
It is both very frustrating and equally alarming.

Of course there are exceptions and Christies - my Dad was in there for his cancer treatment which sadly killed him in the end - is excellent. Probably in no small part due to the vast charitable donations they get, which means they are better funded than most.

But you're dead right about IT systems. The National Program for IT was another absolute utter disgrace run by inept government. I can't remember offhand how much money they had wasted on that before it got canned, but from memory it was around £10 billion. The total estimated project cost had spiralled to over £20bn when it was abandoned.

Even at the £10bn level, that's over £7k for every single one of the 1.4 m people who work in the NHS. Including every cleaner, porter, car park attendant and god knows what else. How on earth can we not deliver a successful IT project to provide a integrated database of patient records, for that sort of money? It just beggars belief.

 

[inbetween]

It's probably more down to the fact you haven't come up with a better solution and are basically criticising an institution that has worked for the UK for nigh on 60 years.

It's helped 99% of the country and failed 1% (figures plucked out of thin air, but I'm guessing it won't be that far off)

Medicine and it's development has exponentially increased in price over the past 20 years, especially since the banking crash.

That coupled with higher life expectancy, higher cost of machinery, higher cost of drugs and less money available from the government and we are where we are.

Then we have the mismanagement of doctors and nurses especially, where most are employed through an agency increasing the cost of employing them.

We should have a nationalised research and development company, specifically creating drugs that cost the earth on the private market.

We should have a nationalised company that can build specialist medical equipment to allow the right tests to be done cheaper.

We should employ nurses directly to dispel the secondary cost of them.

If we had more staff at a cheaper cost, the attitudes of staff would be better as they wouldn't be asked to do 100 hour weeks and satisfaction of people would be higher.

All of this is idealism where you are blaming the government rather than the people who are responsible. Many NHS managers are earning 6 figure salaries and they have the autonomy to do everything you have said but they earn their salaries by just crying for more money.

I worked for the NHS many moons ago and I had two team leaders in my team of 5... All earning far beyond what they should of been, myself included! The job of my team leaders was not to lead the team though, their job was to report to someone who had to report to someone else etc etc.

The people above me were only interested in productivity, charts and graphs. When those charts and graphs didn't look right, they blamed the team leaders and us instead of thinking that maybe we need more people or maybe we need to sack half the management to afford new people. Sometimes I was helping to produce reports for people above me instead of actually doing the job.

In the end it is the only public sector job I have ever had and I hated it because of the sheer madness. Even the DSE assessment was mad and involved 3 different people on better pay as 'DSE assessors' and I was even offered a £700 stand-up desk for no particular reason.

The last time I heard they had closed the office because it had been declared unaffordable........... Now some folk would say that is a disgrace, stop the cuts, etc etc but it ignores the fact that the office was essentially using £50 notes as fire logs.

This is the kind of thinking and culture you get in massive organisations. It is a kind of entitled ignorance and money sink of junk and waste with not really much being done. For every nurse in the NHS you can bet there is an army of administrators and managers above them who are paid far more to nag them to death and make the job a living hell.

Is it any wonder that they hate the job? I hated mine and that was not because of money because we were paid well. It was because of the pathetic culture and total incompetence of the top heavy management.

So yeah let's just chuck more money in and do all these things but I can guarantee you that barely 10p in every £1 will actually pay for healthcare. The NHS is the 8th largest employer in the world so surely the question stands as to how can it possibly be short of healthcare staff....? Or maybe actually is there a large portion of those staff that do nothing to contribute to healthcare at all?

 

[BobKowalski]

Without going over every line above, I'm not trying to suggest that all of the NHS' failings are of its own making. The issue is, what are the failings and how can we improve performance where it is lacking. Of course I agree that much of it is down to funding and that although the NHS budget has never been higher, costs have also never been higher and there's always a need for more funds.

But as it stands, you can barely make such suggestions without getting your head bitten off. Look at my opening post on this thread and the response it got! I merely called it out as I see it; that in absolute terms, our NHS is not performing as well as it could, nor as well as other national health services in other countries.

On a small point, c.difficile was rife throughout Bristol hospitals maybe 10 years ago, with countless outbreaks and special isolation wards for those affected. Yet in the local Bupa hospital - now run by Spire, and quite a big facility - they had precisely zero cases of c.diff. Maybe this was coincidence, but also maybe it's because the hygene standards in our public hospitals - which if going by the amount of detritus you see on the floor every day appears to be terrible - is actually terrible.

Perhaps if you phrased your OP in a less combative tone you may have got a more measured response.

In any event the level of care we get for the per capita spending is remarkable. We spend around $3,700 per capita, the US around $10,000 per capita and Germany around $5,250. The NHS is very efficient and provides a bigger bang for its buck than most. You want better health care? Spend more money.