AIBU to ask if you believe that a labour government will go some way to fixing the NHS?

My family and I have all had amazing NHS care in Wales.

My friend's mother needs a cataract op as she can't see. She is 50 weeks through the current waiting of 125 weeks in Wales. Personally I think the NHS in England is pretty dire but the same wait is 25 weeks currently here.

Not too many people rave about the NHS in Wales.

My family and I have all had amazing NHS care in Wales. My GP is fantastic. My elderly mother had all sorts of appointments, operations and interventions and has had excellent care. I work for the NHS in Wales and my Healthboard is fantastic. Always working to improve things and the team I work with are committed, hard working and dedicated and provide an excellent service that patients rate highly. The biggest issue is trying to save money. Taxing wealth is the best way I can see of getting more money into the public purse without raising income tax. I don’t think any party are brave enough to do that.

I think Labour are the most likely to prioritise it. Tories just want privatisation and they can all afford private. They do t care about people.

So sorry @Printspped 🌷

Maybe they won’t but what I do know is that it is an absolute shit show currently and the Tories have overseen this for god knows how many years.

You only realise just how bad it is when you need it. My mum died last yet and I can’t describe how bad it was. The staff as always were as good as they could be given the circumstances. The rest was fucking hideous. A 7 hour wait for an Ambulance on the floor after a fall, 3 hours in the ambulance outside A and E as they were too busy to even see her. Blood on the floor, 16 hours on a trolley in a corridor with about 20 others in the same boat, 2 days on a side ward off A and E, moving between wards and then hospitals. An absolute fucking shitshow.

I would advise everyone to look after their health because it’s fucking awful when you need help,

And pay them. Stuffing NHS mouths with gold has worked ever since 1948.

So there are massive staff shortages and the staff they have are stressed and exhausted and the stated Labour policy/ solution is to get them to work even more on evenings and weekends to reduce the lists. No, I don't think Labour has the answer to improve things.

No it wouldn't, it may get worse at a slower pace but we are heading in one direction whatever the colour of the next government.

We have an ageing population. 20% of the UK population is aged 65+. We have much better diagnostics now. The figure that 1 in 2 of us will be diagnosed with cancer means more people are entitled to expensive treatments that we would all want for ourselves or our relatives/friends. Then there are advances in the treatment of child with life-limiting diagnoses. No-one would begrudge them the best quality of life though the costs can be phenomenal.

The people who keep citing the problems with the NHS in Wales are somewhat simplifying things. The Welsh administration in the Sennedd can only operate within the parameters of the funding they are allocated. Wales has more elderly people as a proportion of the population than England and has a high degree of deprivation. There are questions to be asked about the funding formula. Also there has been more focus on social care which imo is artificially seen a separate from health. That isn’t to deny that there are problems but it isn’t as straightforward a comparison as it looks. I think Labour would make some improvements and things would deteriorate further under the Tories but it’s a mammoth task and there needs to be radical reform which I don’t think will happen.

This is a slight tangent but I am currently on (paid) training to be an allied health professional. It is SO fucking hard and stressful it’s like they don’t want us to qualify. Whilst I understand there needs to be a good standard, it is unbelievable. Block after block, then they wonder why no one wants to work for the nhs when they are already burnt out!

I think we are all sick of the excuses. The NHS does not work, and it never will. Time for a discussion about what could replace it

Even getting my mum a blood test now is an absolute shit show.

Before the pandemic I would take her either to the local health centre or hospital. I would sit her down in the waiting room, get the number from the ticket machine and within 20 minutes.... job done. They were rushed off their feet and working hard.

They stopped this during the pandemic and never went back to it. They got use to not working hard and have no desire to go back to it

You now have to book a slot on the Internet or over the phone. Slots that are rarely available. Forget the phone because you cannot get through, and the site to book the test will often crash. Shambles... Two weeks it took to get her last test, and a further two week until the test itself.

When you eventually get a slot you go down to the clinic and it's like a ghost town. The phlebotomists are leisurely sitting around with no patients to jab.

The NHS.... Envy of the world.

Yes. Has to be better than these assholes.

foodtoorder, so the decision to smoke , booze, take drugs, overeat aren't choices then ?

The IT thing is about more than investment though.

It appears to be investment gone mad, with no joined up thinking.

For years we had a GP system to allow us to order prescriptions, make appointments, view test results etc. It was fab, it was efficient and worked. If you needed a hospital referral you received a letter. Not quite so efficient but still it worked.

Now the IT is chaos. I can log onto my GP system and book a prescription and sometimes I can find my test results there, but that is it.

To book an appointment we are back to having to ring in and ask.

For hospital referrals the system goes mad. Last month I received a phone call from a central booking system asking which hospital I would like to go too (why, when my Consultant only works at one of the local Hospitals?), then a notification that something has been added to my NHS app, then another notification to log into ‘Patient knows Best’ where I find an appointment letter, then I get a text message, then a letter in the post.. A week later I received another letter in the post (why?) another notification to log into ‘Patient knows Best’ and another text message. This week, more text messages reminding me of my appointment with dire warnings about how much it will cost if I miss it.

I understand the issue of patients not attending and the cost to the NHS but what I don’t understand is being bombarded from every direction about one appointment. I have never missed a hospital or GP appointment in my life and am not about too. The barrage of phone calls, letters, emails & texts is totally confusing. Each time I have to grab my diary to check if the new missive is to inform me that something has changed.

I can’t be the only person who thinks this is madness. Googling ‘Patient Knows Best v NHS app’ there are dozens of people querying why both.

Then there are the curved balls. Just as I decide to delete the NHS app I am notified that it contains my recent hospital test results, which do not appear in Patient Knows Best or on my GP system.

Total, utter, inefficient chaos and just one of the reasons the NHS is falling apart !!

@Bluebackedsheep The reason the IT infrastructure is so shit it's that capital investment has been dire AND you have to bid for it. So not everyone gets it. It's madness. It's not enough to say 'our wards are crumbling, buildings leaking and our matrons are running patient safety audits on bits of paper. Please can we have some money to fix the leaks and upgrade our IT/get ipads'. Because saying that (which is a statement of the bleeding obvious and causes massive inefficiency due to beds being shut while estates try and endlessly patch things up and crazy amount of clinical hours lost to scanning bits of paper/admin because we have no technology) doesn't get you capital funding. You get funding via spending enormous man hours trying to work out which possible pot of money you could be possibly fit your request in and then going through endless hoops and hoping you get lucky (which means some other poor trust hasn't got it's roof fixed or it's IT updated
If you under invest in staff (training them and retaining them) and infrastructure for over a decade eventually the impact on the front line becomes impossible to hide.
If we went for co-pay or private people would be posting about the terrifying cost of health insurance, to get us out of the massive black whole will cost billions, because it is always more expensive to repair or fix things than it is to maintain them as functional.

This

"Britain's tax burden is set to hit its highest since the Second World War while public debt is close to 100% of gross domestic product, up from 35% just over 15 years ago due to huge spending to support the economy during the global financial crisis, the COVID pandemic and the 2022 surge.

"This will be a thorny inheritance for whoever is in office after this year's general election," the IFS said.

"Both Labour and the Conservatives have promised to reduce debt as a fraction of national income. Yet a combination of high debt interest payments and low growth is forecast to make this much more difficult to achieve than in the recent past."

Being in government at the moment is a poisoned chalice. Beyond the usual comments about PPE waste and contracts for mates, there simply isn't the money. We have structural economic and demographic issues that no government can wave a magic wand and fix. Including the NHS which can't continue in its current form for much longer. I understand why people want change but I think there will be disillusionment in a couple of years when the reality sinks in.

We’ll see, won’t we?

Nail on head. George Galloway got one thing right this week when he said..... Sunak and Starmer are two cheeks of the same arse". Never a truer word spoken.

Nothing will change when Labour get in except the political rhetoric. The people who run the country now will be running it under Labour. Civil Servants do not get voted out.

I am not ignoring the funding issue. I am saying that The NHS is beyond fixing, and it will always want more money no matter how much it gets. Let's stop throwing good money after bad and try to find another solution. At least we all agree that the current service it provides is totally unacceptable. Have you been in an A&E recently. Dear God what a disgrace....

Hilarious. No I don’t think Labour will “fix” the NHS. War-monger Tony Blair brought in PPP/PFI and the NHS now needs to have people paying in. Labour and the Tories are both centre ground parties who will say anything to get/retain power, in reality Labour will be no different and will not “save” the NHS. Foolish to think so.

I like to hear honesty

you getting good care which is what you absolutely should get does not mean things are just fine once you access a service

we provide a good service we have very good outcomes we are struggling and are so stretched (as all my colleagues are) to do this and we can’t give the extra support we once could and further cuts in services just adds to the pressure and what can be provided

this is how things are this is why there are strikes this is why so many are leaving jobs they have trained so hard for and love

it’s not good enough we all deserve better and it’s far from fine

The likes of me are why the NHS is so bad? What on earth are you talking about? Actually don't even bother answering because I won't respond. You're deliberately ignoring the funding issue even though there is so much evidence that services have crumbled because of it. Maybe leave the discussion to people who can digest information.

Can we encourage them to actually call an election? I mean a little gentle encouragement couldn't hurt?

Perhaps we could all turn out kettles on at once and blow the national grid, or something. Give them a little MN-Hint.

There you go. That's not exactly lazy, is it @Rachel757677 ?

Yes! For the love of GOD Vote the bloody tories out 🙏