The NHS

Worked for the NHS, admitting bias right away.

People who work for the NHS are seen as heros and angels because they do a job that is on the whole pretty abhorrent. You get covered in piss and shit and bodily fluids on a daily basis. When its not vile it can be emotionally tolling on a level that is difficult to understand if you've not been there. Personally I'll take getting covered in vomit from a pensioner with a gastro bleed any day over watching the light leave a mothers eyes as she realises the chest compressions aren't doing a fucking thing for her child. Or the sound of a man who has popped in for a visit to his elderly mum and found that shes fallen down the stairs and had to lie there for hours cold and alone and scared. These are extreme examples, but they happen every single day on every single shift for a lot of people. Welcome to the world of emergency healthcare, every single person I speak to is having at the very least a very bad day and possibly the worst day of their lives.

These are not things that happen on a daily basis in the chemical engineering industry or at airport security. You do not rely on chemical engineers and baggage scanners to save the day on the worst day of your life. They do an important job but the stakes and the pressure are incomparable. Airport security might prevent a terrorist attack sure, but they don't go in to working knowing that a situation of that magnitude is going to happen on a daily, weekly, monthly basis - they know it will happen at most once in their careers. Paramedics do, Doctors do, Call Handlers do. That is why they are treated differently.

The NHS is failing in many regards, I fully accept that. This is because the NHS suffers from chronic problems:

1. The NHS suffers from a complete lack of funding. Yes the NHS has a massive budget and yes it has a lot of staff but in comparison to the budget it would have if we were all paying for private health care it is miniscule. We pay a small fee for a good service, if you want to pay a large fee for a superb service you are more than able to. If I buy a Dacia Sandero I don't expect it to act like an Aston Martin, I just accept that in 90% of situations it is going to do everything I need a car to do and in the extreme examples I'll take the hit. I was made redundant with a significant number of my colleagues because my trust didn't get a 2% rise to keep up with inflation, that's how fine the margins are.

2. The NHS is ultimately run by people who are making decisions based on short political careers. Perhaps they are Health Secretary for a parliament or two or perhaps they are for 5 minutes before a reshuffle. Every one of them wants to make a big difference, a big win so they can continue climbing the ladder and the overwhelming majority of them have little to no experience in healthcare. No other major global businesses make decisions on such a short term basis (football clubs tend to and most of them yoyo around uncontrollably, just look at City before we got a stable long term plan).

This is just my opinion, feel free to disagree and I really don't want to have an argument. The NHS is a fantastic institution doing a fantastic job in shitty circumstances and I will always defend it because I have seen it and its people at its best and worst, and I've seen private healthcare at its best and worst and I know which one I want for my family every time. Maybe I'll die of cancer that could have been prevented, maybe I'll get hit by a car and have to wait too long for an ambulance, but at least I won't bankrupt my family in the process and I won't see the people who need the most help get turned away because they don't have a salary to match.
Thank-you for sharing.

This is not my maint point, but ! do think you overstate the drama of NHS work for many of its 1.4m employees, many of whom are not I am sure, experiencing the daily stresses you describe. For a smaller percentage, perhaps these are regular occurrences and for those people, I take my hat off. But there's hundreds of thousands doing all sorts of jobs - you would know better than me. I cannot imagine the women running the mobile breast-scanning clinic parked up at Morrisons, experience the daily trauma you describe, and there are countless other roles I am sure, where people are similarly not so stressed.

But really I digress. This is not about whether you should or should not "defend the NHS". The issue is whether we can have a sensible debate about how we could do things better, without people getting all defensive and shouting down the debate.

Maybe the way its structured at the moment is perfect (barring your point 2 above) and all it needs is more money. But personally, I very much doubt that and I think all options should be on the table for NHS 2.0, so long as the fundamental principle of "free" healthcare for all is maintained.
 
sensible debate? just another way of claiming "i know more than you, but you're too thick to realise". The pompous pillock who posts the same in the brexit thread, and his little band of "likers", failing to debate anything but "we won you lost" death of democracy blah blah. When brexits refuse to acknowledge the racist, xenophobic nature of their campaign, that the billionaires backing of brexit, with their carpet-bombing of social media , makes any "debate" pointless. The two sides are long past debating as there is nothing to debate... brexit wants to destroy workers rights but dress it up as some "moral crusade ffs"... remainers dont, the country has been driven too far to the thatcherist side already, thanks to the most partisan media since the printing press was invented....
 
sensible debate? just another way of claiming "i know more than you, but you're too thick to realise". The pompous pillock who posts the same in the brexit thread, and his little band of "likers", failing to debate anything but "we won you lost" death of democracy blah blah. When brexits refuse to acknowledge the racist, xenophobic nature of their campaign, that the billionaires backing of brexit, with their carpet-bombing of social media , makes any "debate" pointless. The two sides are long past debating as there is nothing to debate... brexit wants to destroy workers rights but dress it up as some "moral crusade ffs"... remainers dont, the country has been driven too far to the thatcherist side already, thanks to the most partisan media since the printing press was invented....

Play time is over Mr Buzzer these gentleman will escort you back to your room, don’t forget your magic pills we found some under the bed this morning:-)
 
sensible debate? just another way of claiming "i know more than you, but you're too thick to realise". The pompous pillock who posts the same in the brexit thread, and his little band of "likers", failing to debate anything but "we won you lost" death of democracy blah blah. When brexits refuse to acknowledge the racist, xenophobic nature of their campaign, that the billionaires backing of brexit, with their carpet-bombing of social media , makes any "debate" pointless. The two sides are long past debating as there is nothing to debate... brexit wants to destroy workers rights but dress it up as some "moral crusade ffs"... remainers dont, the country has been driven too far to the thatcherist side already, thanks to the most partisan media since the printing press was invented....

Bellbuzzer post......

racist...tick!

xenophobic...tick!

Thatcher...tick!

media...tick!

I could go on ;-)
 
NHS has some right pieces of shit at the top level who over pay for certain services ect. A chronic waste of money that should be funding other parts of the service.

As a nation we need to take more care of ourselves too, stop going to the doctors for a runny nose and being demics it is no wonder it is struggling.
 
Thank-you for sharing.

This is not my maint point, but ! do think you overstate the drama of NHS work for many of its 1.4m employees, many of whom are not I am sure, experiencing the daily stresses you describe. For a smaller percentage, perhaps these are regular occurrences and for those people, I take my hat off. But there's hundreds of thousands doing all sorts of jobs - you would know better than me. I cannot imagine the women running the mobile breast-scanning clinic parked up at Morrisons, experience the daily trauma you describe, and there are countless other roles I am sure, where people are similarly not so stressed.

But really I digress. This is not about whether you should or should not "defend the NHS". The issue is whether we can have a sensible debate about how we could do things better, without people getting all defensive and shouting down the debate.

Maybe the way its structured at the moment is perfect (barring your point 2 above) and all it needs is more money. But personally, I very much doubt that and I think all options should be on the table for NHS 2.0, so long as the fundamental principle of "free" healthcare for all is maintained.
Do you know how many drs and nurses etc that are hands on and get emotionally affected by it?
You would say blue was white rather than accept what people who know tell you
It's like talking to a wall
 
There are other factors like immigrants coming into this country for the sole reason to use our free NHS, clogging up the system. And many of these don’t speak a word of English so huge amounts of NHS funding is being spent on translators in hospitals or surgeries to allow the immigrant and the Dr/Nurse/GP to communicate with the patient. .

...

Overall a good post and then this.

Please can you post the evidence of this happening?
 
I think we all would like to give more money to help the good things that the nhs does well but unfortunately it would also fund the areas it does badly yet has traditionally taken the lions share.
Until the management can do its job to identify these areas and streamline them costs will rise faster than funding no matter how much extra cash is allocated.

What areas are doing badly?

Do you read any of my posts of what is happening in Manchester?
 

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