How would you fix the NHS?

When I was there i obviously helped my mother with personal care, and my father before then, when he was hospitalised. But I would have been seriously financially hit if it had been expected I could stay overnight, every night, and for every meal and wash over the ten admissions. Friends and our children could often help, but even so. Perhaps in Spain people live closer.

TBH, the wards don’t make it easy for you to, say, store the one type and flavour of yoghurt or ice cream a terminally ill parent will still actually eat and retrieve it and find a teaspoon when they have some appetite and would
enjoy eating it.

My mum would definitely have done this for my dad. As would a lot of partners who may be retired and have the time.
To have a sensible discussion about the NHS, we need to move away from blocking every single suggestion with what ifs and buts.

@JenniferBooth I’m very sorry to hear about your experience with your father. Doesn’t sound like a safe discharge for him. Also time for your mother to find somewhere more manageable to live maybe.

@Memyaelf I do think we could learn a little bit from the Spanish. There are plenty of people who do actually have time to spare and I think they would like to be included in caregiving.

@JenniferBooth @Abra1t Obviously, not everyone’s able to help, but even knowing that just one patient is being cared for by a family member for a couple of hours could make all the difference to the amount of care staff can provide for the other patients.

They won't do shared care either. So if you eg get a private prescription for HRT they won't take over the prescriptions. And of course lots of people go privately for mental health help for themselves or their children.

Some people have said they won't even accept things from other NHS practitioners which seems absolutely ludicrous. I have no idea what they are playing at.

So far, nothing like that from my GP though.

Reality is that women would need to be taking time off work or leaving paid employment to do it, as it would become expected.

My mother had ten admissions in her last seven months. It was disruptive to work to keep going to see how she was doing but I managed the 150-mile drive as often as I possibly could because obviously I was extremely worried about her. But I couldn’t possibly have been there every meal time and carried on with my work.

Is the state able to cope with the reduction in income tax from women this would result in? Because I know how it would go—huge pressure on women to be ‘good’ daughters.

And 40"000 care workers left the profession due to the Covid vaccine mandate. A fact which must never be mentioned.

Nurses have the time to support them, rather than supporting everyone of the 30 patients. Those with families who help, make a huge difference to their loved by ones lives, as well as supporting nurses to care for those who are less fortunate because they don’t have families. Has anyone heard about ‘granny dumpers’.. it happens regularly in the nhs. And then there are the families who don’t allow their relative to be discharged to a nursing home because they don’t want mums/dads house to be used for care fees. So they make sure they are kept in hospital. This happens.

What happens about the personal care of patients who don't have family to come in and do this for them?

And how many British employers would be happy with family taking time off work to do what they do in Spain. OH WAIT A MINUTE Lets do the litmus test. Would the NHS let those degree qualified nurses take time off work to do the same!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In short Would the NHS put its money where its mouth is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And yet when i see posts on here saying that SOME nurses now think they are above doing personal care we see loads of posts underneath denying this.
But your posts prove that the former were right!

I’ve worked in the nhs for a lifetime..when loved ones come into hospital.. the family generally expect nurses to deal with all their personal care needs.. they do not contribute to their loved ones needs (except the precious few involved relatives, who do x).. Compare this to Spain.. who are In the top 5 for quality. Well above the UK. The family are expected to provide the personal care, and are expected to stay overnight for the duration. This frees up the degree qualified nurses do the technical nursing that they are actually trained to do.

I think the 'poorly paid nurses' trope is well outdated these days.
Yet still we as a nation persist in pushing it. I've even seen nurses described as 'low paid' on here and someone will always say the NHS's biggest priority should be to pay nurses more.
When I see either of the above, I am compelled to ask the poster if they actually know what nurses are paid. I think it is so hardwired into our psyche people parrot it without even knowing!

TBH most "nurses" on the ward are in fact HCA's and not band 5/6, so would fall into "low paid/over worked"

Incorrect. The set ratio of qualified to unqualified in the UK is between 70-30 for acute wards, and 60/40 for less acute wards.

The starting pay for a graduate nurse is around the average starting salary for an average graduate. And I believe they get extra for certain shift patterns, uniform provided, and overtime paid. It doesnt go up as quickly though as some other professions.

Its the same with a lot of roles, that you can earn more with no qualifications, especially ones that are highly unionised. Makes you wonder why people bother going to uni.

I do think they pay nursing staff very poorly

As someone who works in a job that is considered minimum wage (although employer pays London living wage) and without any qualification, with the extra income I get from it. I am definitely on more than a level 5 nurse.

Something isn’t quite right when you look around at other employers who pay more than minimum wage for someone who doesn’t have even GCSEs

We are also free to take any other work.

There's no compulsion to have both done at the same time. People are free to have them separately. It's not like the MMR where they have to be done as one (unless you go privately).

I had my Covid jab a couple of weeks ago and have my flu jab booked for a couple of weeks' time. I wanted a month between the two, and there was no problem at all booking them in that way.

My dad died on 6 October three weeks after being discharged from hospital he was 88 had prostate cancer and died in a fall at home.
DB (who drives. I dont) starts work at 4 am Finishes at 3 pm and he has been over to see DM nearly every day after work. Ive been over a couple of times a week. DB is in a manual job not shuffling papers on a desk and gets tired. Last Friday he was mowing both lawns. DM is hard work because she is deaf and refuses hearing aids. I was trying to discuss Dads wake with her and i had to say the word wake ELEVEN times. Im worried its going to affect DBs health Its just not sustainable.

I do wonder if it’s a good idea to make patients to have the flu and Covid booster done at the same time, Most who have both are elderly or have health issues. People react badly to one injection so what about two together?

If the NHS sees a surge in patients being admitted as ill from having both vaccines a few days before. Then that is money wasted. As if had a week-10 day gap between vaccines, they may just be under the weather for a day or two, take it easy then, there would be no need for hospital admission

See the scandal of doing operations without anasthetic (hysteroscopies) its the scandal that refuses to break. And the angel rhetoric doesnt help

Allow a family member to help with basic care where appropriate and if they want to help. I do think it could help reduce risk of secondary problems occurring due to a hospital admission.

For example, quality time could be spent encouraging adequate nutrition and hydration, sitting out, moving around, walking, conversation.

Far better than the occasional brief interaction with a health care professional that an elderly person might forget once they’ve been left alone.

Realistically, what does a fluid balance chart look like in an unwell, elderly patient if they’re on their own all day. How could this affect them over their admission, especially with the heating that they insist on blasting in this mild weather?

Simple things, but when you think of the cost of not addressing these problems, and the lack of resources to address them, why aren’t we doing more to involve families?

My mum had a stroke, she died 6 weeks later and never came home, the care she received, overall, was v good, there were some initial issues with turning mum and bed wetting but addressed very quickly after we spoke to the ward manager, who then, on our suggestion, got mum a different bed.

We were also asked to visit at meal times so we could feed mum, this then gave them more time to feed patients without family, of course we agreed to this.

Mum was then sent to a cottage hospital for the last 4 weeks of her life, the care there was utterly fantastic and individual to her needs.

I 'm not you and didn't exp the care you did, that doesn't mean i think all staff are angels, they are human, with all that entails but what i did find was where things did go wrong, finding the right person to talk to to get things put right was possible.

So of course i wouldn't be happy at all, esp the X ray on the hip, having said that i was once sent home with a missed broken ankle over a week end, on the monday a very concerned Dr called to say "Please please don't walk on your foot or you may need an operation... we missed the fracture, you need to come straight back in" this would have been 1995 or 96 i think.

shit happens, i guess i'm more understanding that people make mistakes or simply don't do what they should have done.

the problem with healthcare staff is that if most people have a bad day at the office or are even poor at our jobs, it simply doesn't have the impact that a poor HCP has on our lives.

Re logging progress - I agree. But in the absence of that, what's the solution now? Would you be happy with the treatment we and my dad received? She refused to call us, we couldn't wait with him and the calls just rang without being answered to A&E. Staff on the main switchboard were too busy to send a message. What exactly would your solution have been?

I'm glad you had two good experiences. You are basing your opinion on those. We didn't so I think we are allowed to base our experience on this.

As for your one part of the NHS - we spent four months with my dad in six separate hospitals with very brief periods at home. We did A&E (four times), general (three times), district nurses in between, respite care in hospital twice, palliative care, and nursing homes. So quite a broad base to firm opinions I think.

The A&E staff who didn't think an xray was necessary after a heavy fall and sent him home with a broken hip didn't help matters.

So do forgive me for not falling in with the all NHS staff are angels line please

Well thats not exactly how it works but if you want lower waiting lists and greater choice then the UK has to pay more tax to get more equipment/staff/hospitals.

The NHS is already relatively efficient, its had 14 years austerity, i doubt there is too much to cut.

Thats your experience of the NHS, one part of it, its not the NHS is it? as you said earlier "there many excellent nurses too"

My first AE exp was "collapsed following an accident in which i had broken hip and femur but didn't realise, taken into AE, very quickly given an ECG by a HCA, minutes later, on to a ward, where i spent a very comfortable 3 days"

Second AE exp "infected arm, suspected sepsis, seen immediately by GP, into hospital, 2hr wait in AE, 2 days on a ward where and i'll be honest here, many people just taking the piss out of staff, ringing the emergency bell to get a nurse to fetch their dressing gown, open/close blinds, fetch a cup of water... from people who could walk to the bathroom.

TBH most "nurses" on the ward are in fact HCA's and not band 5/6, so would fall into "low paid/over worked"

My DD is moving back from Australia due to family emergency, she has got a band 6 job in the local NHS, her first application.

An AE receptionist cannot be ringing around every family who asks her too, that could be dozens of phone calls per shift, we'd soon get complaints of "i was kept waiting whilst the lazy fat cow was on the phone...."

... a better solution would be a means where families can log in to a system where they can monitor their family members progress through the hospital.

I might add that when I posted my dad's A&E nightmare on here, I was mainly told to suck it up because the staff are overworked and underpaid, as if this justifies the receptionists attitude.
I asked then and will ask again here - does anyone know of any other job where you can refuse to serve a customer at any point throughout the day by saying you will be too busy? And as a consequence cause massive distress than elderly couple and inconvenience to his family?
That's the NHS for you.

I think abandoning the rhetoric of NHS staff being poorly-paid angels who are beyond any repproach whatsoever would go some way to opening a sensible discussion about the NHS, to be honest.
I've just come to the end of a long stretch with my dying dad and yes, there have been some excellent nurses but there have been some dreadful ones too, who couldn't even be bothered to put my dad in his own pyjamas because it was easier to one hospital one's on the trolly and just dumped his tea beyond his reach. Both of these things take no extra time whatsoever, but there are too many apologists too eager to justify this on the basis of low-paid angels.
I could tell many more stories but paeticular mention goes to the A&E receptionist who refused to phone me when my 86-year-old dad was ready to be collected because she knew she would be too busy six hours later apparently and then didn't answer the phone because she was too busy. In desperation, I drove to collect him at 10pm. He had beenbwaiting since 4pm. An absolute disgrace.