Perhaps my "combatitive tone" - not that I think it is when you read the opening post - was brought about by me being sick to death of the sycophantic defending by others of something which is quite obviously not perfect, and in fact is far from that.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.
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. Healthcare is on the low end of priorities in some elements of the NHS.
How many of the best and brightest of the chemical engineering industry are here because they had free healthcare regardless of their parents' income?I'm prompted to ask this after my daring to question junior doctors in another thread, and the general outrage such comments cause. It wasn't particularly bad this time, but generally, if anyone makes any negative comments about the NHS, they are treated like they've fucked the pope.
What is it that causes such reaction? Is it because the NHS employs SO many people that nearly everyone has a family member or friend or neighbour who works for them?
Any suggestion that the NHS could be improved by some change or other, is pounced upon. And god help anyone who suggests - shock horror - maybe the private sector could do some of the work!?! You'd be rounded up and shot if some had their way.
If the service the NHS gave was amazing, it would be easier to understand. But the waiting times are terrible, the availability of leading edge treatments and facilities "patchy" to downright poor. And the clinical outcomes for things like cancer, woeful. In short, it's pretty poor to be honest.
People who work there are all "angels" or "heros" or whatever. Despite the fact they *chose* to go into the profession and they get paid for doing so. They weren't press-ganged into it. But dare to suggest that some nurses are lazy sods for whom picking up crap off the floor or doing some other actually important task, is beneath them.
You go up to the average nursing station on the average ward and 3 or 4 of them will blank you for 10 minutes. If any shop treated you like that, you'd walk out. But when the NHS does it, they are marvellous.
Why no such love-in for the chemical engineering industry? How about passionately sticking up for airport security staff who do such an amazing job preventing those nasty terrorists?
Nope, the NHS is rank average at best, and the sooner people can stop romanticising and face up to the fact, the sooner we can start thinking about how we can get a better health service for all of us.
Perhaps my "combatitive tone" - not that I think it is when you read the opening post - was brought about by me being sick to death of the sycophantic defending by others of something which is quite obviously not perfect, and in fact is far from that.
What a load of tripe. There's nothing "combative" about saying the NHS is far from perfect.Again a combative tone. How about leaving you self evident dislike of the NHS at the door and engage with the many excellent points that have been made in this thread and by people with knowledge of the workings of the NHS.
I will reiterate my earlier points though. The NHS isn’t a business and it isn’t a shop where you get to act the ‘outraged customer’. It’s a Health Care provider that manages to provide a wider care for the population of the U.K. than most comparable countries and on per capita spending that is lower than more comparable countries.
Perhaps if we took some pride in the NHS and what it does instead of sneering about its ‘customer service’ as if it was the local florist and ragging on it every five minutes we could start by examining what we could do better in a more balanced way.
That isn't what I was trying to suggest. Throwing money ad infinitum will plaster over a wound at best.
There needs to be a change in the target driven culture, to one which delivers the best possible care for the best possible cost without affecting the quality of care. Yes, that is idealist, but I guess that's where I think we should be looking towards rather than governments getting criticised for its performance and the standard response being "it's never had more money than now".
We need to get the pride back in working for the NHS. At the moment it is downtrodden and lamented.
As a country, we need to decide what we want to specialise in moving forwards. Why not make it medical R&D and technology? Create a new branch of the NHS that finds new drugs, sells to the NHS at cost and sell to other countries for a small profit to cover the costs of manufacture and development.
Have another wing of the NHS creating new medical diagnostic and surgical machines. Use the same selling method to cover costs and wages.
In the interim, the IT system needs upgrading across the board. As Chippy said in a previous post, it's utter madness that it's cost £20B so far on a dud system.
The NHS should not be used in party politics. There should be a cross party committee set up to get a common approach to stop one government coming in and ripping up what the previous one tried.
You’re dead right. At least 5 people have died, and 5 are seriously ill after eating food, contaminated with listeria, in NHS Hospitals. Surely outsourcing food production is one of the first areas the NHS could focus on....And I might add, I completely refuse to accept that providing healthcare services is so completely and utterly different from providing any other sort of services, that no commercial models involving any sort of private enterprise can possibly work.
The sort of stuff Bob likes to spout about it not being a shop and patients aren't customers. Well why aren't we customers? Why is it that the sorts of customer experience we all expect to receive, is suddenly not applicable when dealing with the NHS? Why is "because it's the NHS" an excuse for giving poor service, and that this is perfectly fine?
The claim is made that medical care - i.e. providing a service which costs money - and a profit motive are not compatible. The implication being that private enterprise will try to avoid doing the right thing because it costs money. Well how do Marks & Spencer manage? Or John Lewis? How is it John Lewis can give such great service when all they care about is bottom line profit? Taking a 3 month old shirt back that doesn't fit - or doing a mammogram twice (at their own cost) because the last one wasn't clear. These are both costly services, and we're being asked to conclude that no private company would do the latter, because of a profit motive, and yet our best private businesses can offer the former?
So the argument doesn't hold water. Those opposed to increasing privatisation are imo not opposed to it for pragmatic reasons, they are ideologically opposed to it. If it costs the NHS to undertake activity X for Y pounds and a private provider can do better service for less than Y, people like Bob still won't consider it. Maybe that's why they like to big up how marvellous it is.
And I might add, I completely refuse to accept that providing healthcare services is so completely and utterly different from providing any other sort of services, that no commercial models involving any sort of private enterprise can possibly work.
The sort of stuff Bob likes to spout about it not being a shop and patients aren't customers. Well why aren't we customers? Why is it that the sorts of customer experience we all expect to receive, is suddenly not applicable when dealing with the NHS? Why is "because it's the NHS" an excuse for giving poor service, and that this is perfectly fine?
The claim is made that medical care - i.e. providing a service which costs money - and a profit motive are not compatible. The implication being that private enterprise will try to avoid doing the right thing because it costs money. Well how do Marks & Spencer manage? Or John Lewis? How is it John Lewis can give such great service when all they care about is bottom line profit? Taking a 3 month old shirt back that doesn't fit - or doing a mammogram twice (at their own cost) because the last one wasn't clear. These are both costly services, and we're being asked to conclude that no private company would do the latter, because of a profit motive, and yet our best private businesses can offer the former?
So the argument doesn't hold water. Those opposed to increasing privatisation are imo not opposed to it for pragmatic reasons, they are ideologically opposed to it. If it costs the NHS to undertake activity X for Y pounds and a private provider can do better service for less than Y, people like Bob still won't consider it. Maybe that's why they like to big up how marvellous it is.