Do non NHS people realise how bad it is at the moment?

[DoyouknowJo]

I had to justify to my managers manager why I needed to spend £7 on stationery. Stationery. Some biros, some staples and a box of envelopes.

One of my colleagues chairs broke and she was told to apply to charitable funds to get a new one.

Everything is held together with sticky tape and blu tac (literally and figuratively)

We have four members of admin staff bunched into a desk meant for two, because there is no money to pay IT to put a new port in on their desks.

Waste toner cartridges are on lockdown. If yours is full you should take a scalpel, cut the seal open, empty it and then stick it back together and put it back in the printer. Don't worry about all your printing then being covered in smudgy ink. We're broke ya know.

And some fucking idiot turned up to A&E today...because their arm has been hurting for two months and they are off on holiday tomorrow and could we sort it please.

I'm thinking of starting an anonymous instagram account to get all this crap out.

When I quit my band 3 post last year, about 25% of the department of maybe 50 staff were band 7 or 8 (additional clinical services). They swanned around in their own clothes as if they were medics, implementing policies that meant unsafe and unfair practice for those of us doing the drudge work.

New Labour swilled money on the NHS, it achieved not a lot and just contributed to our huge national debt which will still be being paid off by our great grandchildren. New Labour proved for us that 'more money' is not the solution.

It achieved plenty - GPs earn a lot more for doing a lot less, and we now have lots of shiny new hospitals that are going to financially cripple us for years to come.

The NHS is a leaky bucket. Labour's answer is just to keep pouring more and more water in at an ever faster rate whilst the leaks get worse. What needs to happen is that the leaks are fixed instead.

The thing is. Even gp surgeries are fully booked. If someone cannot get a gp appointment, they may have to go to a&e.

Wolfhoundsoflove
Seems like a waste of resources to me, the pain can't be that bad or they'd have gone to the GP two months ago.
People seem to rock up at a&e with the slightest twinge now. The clue is in the name Accident & Emergency.

Which is why we need to start charging a nominal charge for all but the poorest of people.

Family of four, not been to GP in ten years. Yes we’ve been ill but we self treat and so haven’t needed to access services.

Comparative data on the NHS alongside other developed world systems.

Politicians are lining their pockets, creeping privatisation....that’s the heart of the problem.... it’s criminal .... vote for a party that really will defend the NHS and pay its staff properly and stop long shifts for all staff...

I was working in the NHS when that money was “swilled” at it. It made a massive difference, waiting lists went down, waiting times in A&E plummeted, nurses were recruited from all over the world and crucially complaints went down too. If you don’t believe me check the stats between 1995 and 2015.

I do because I can't get a GP appointment for a referral for non-urgent but life-limiting condition. My child can't get braces without a 2-year wait (or a payment plan of £6k!)

Time-wasters are shit but chronic underfunding and the clusterfuck of Brexit are the reason the NHS is breaking. I wish people who wake up to the fact it is deliberately being allowed to fail.

I wonder how many people going to A+E have had to go there because their illness or ailment has got worse either because
a. they cant get a GP appointment

b. they have had pressure from their employer not to have GP appointments during work time which obviously restricts their choices as other employees of other companies will have been told to do the same thing.

I see a very stark similarity on these threads and the social housing ones "its free so put up with it"

Shit! Forgot my last para!

Thank you to all the people who keep working there despite the fucking awful state of things!

I remember running a snack or sweets and coffee shop in our small hospital up north and some serial 999er called an ambulance and demanded to be taken to hospital to be treated for a "gumboil" I think he means abscess then came moaning at me when they got ticked off with him at a and e.... I have no idea what he actually said for an actual ambulance to taxi him to the hospital... I also worked with someone who regularly called an ambulance out a very time she thought she was in labour because why should she pay for a taxi when it's free and she moaned and bitched when they wouldnt take her home... first pregnancy, no complications, no previous MC etc just entitled... it drives me insane with people like this..

NHS Procurement is a joke, a certain number of suppliers monopolise this and can therefore charge extortionate prices. For example: a new chair is needed could purchase one for £30-£50 from the internet but as suppliers are restricted they must be purchased through the specific supplier at £250+; ward requires painting and decorating: local company would charge c.£2k but restrictions mean that the only suppliers permitted charge c.£6k etc. etc.

we now have lots of shiny new hospitals that are going to financially cripple us for years to come.

That wasn't spending. That was avoiding spending by kicking the can up the road. Which is shitty and awful, and while Labour eagerly leapt on the idea, also dreamed up by John Major. Plenty of blame to go around in the PPI mess. Politicians don't care what happens when they're long out of power: après moi, le déluge.

We need to spend more. If we don't, the NHS will collapse in fact if not in name, and anyone who can afford to while seek private insurance instead. Which, if you are cynical, you could argue is the thinking behind current policy.

If anyone had suggested an NHS today, they'd be seen as crazy and verging on communism. We have people in power now who openly argued, a decade or so ago, against the concept. Looking at what they do, and not at what they claim, I don't really think their position has altered much.

The reality is that any system with better care will cost more. Any system with a health insurance system interposed will obviously cost more again, because that system has to be funded over and above the actual care - administrators and assessors and sales teams don't work for nothing, and nor is advertising cheap. What it also means is that those of us able to take out that private care will get better treatment than we do right now, and those who can't will get worse. But all of us, other than the truly indigent, will spend more, because we'll have to fund our own care, the costs of insurance, and that basic care for the indigent, too. It does seem to me that it would be saner to just spend more on the NHS to begin with. But hey ho.

GPs earn a lot more for doing a lot less, and we now have lots of shiny new hospitals that are going to financially cripple us for years to come.

There's a national shortage of GPs. In any other industry that would tell you that the salary is not high enough to justify the long training period and pressures of the job.

I agree that the PFI contracts were badly negotiated and make it far too easy for the FM companies to make big money from changing a light bulb. That was a mistake. But those hospitals urgently needed to be built after years of neglect, and there was no money to pay for it up front.

I work in the public sector and amongst other things my employer is shit hot on making sure we all have the correct size and configuration of desk space, because if they don't they open themselves up to the risks of long term sickness and expensive H&S issues if we all end up with back injuries. The fact that the NHS is having to think so short term now is very, very worrying.

Those people who don’t believe that Labour achieved anything in their last tenure should read this independent report.
So much success in reducing waiting times and other improvements. Have people really forgotten so soon. Make no mistake it is Tory ongoing policies which have caused current problems.

www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/files/field/field_publication_file/independent-audit-nhs-under-labour-1997–2005-sunday-times-march-2005.pdf

Oh that all sounds familiar. Exactly the same in my department! We ran out of paper and I had to beg steel and borrow from other departments. Some people brought in their own stationery but I refused to do that as that wasn’t my problem!

Alsohuman the myth that the extra spending made no difference makes me want to scream, quite frankly. Same with SEN provision; it's been eviscerated. And then people are astonished at the exponential increase in mental health problems in schools, and home education.

If you starve a service of funds, it will get worse. Amazing how many people seem unable to accept that simple proposition.

Sounds awful. Not that it helps, but some private firms are the same.

If the wealthy no longer use the public system the quality will decline far further (see state senior schools Vs independent for a good example)

Complete nonsense, and it’s totally different from schools.

You'd have loved my late MIL, OJZJ - a truly disgusting woman, she demanded community nurse visits for her jabs becaue she was "too ill to get to the surgery". Until one arrived to find her digging the garden that is, when apparently they were "very rude to her" ... at which point she started calling ambulances, expecting the paramedics to give the jabs instead

The really worrying thing is that it took seven 999 calls before this was addressed - and then the community nurses were reinstated as that was apparently "a better use of resources"

when dc was ill (rare disease so getting a diagnosis & treatment took ages) we couldn't afford the nhs.
the specialist centrum was at the other end of the country and their time management was shit so that each (10 min) appointment would have meant a day off work, long and expensive train journey, night at a hotel.
paying the 10k for private diagnosis and consultant care was but the alternative would have been dire as a family.
I wonder how less fortunate people can deal with chronic illness

Just got back from a hospital appointment for an ultrasound scan. When I went in asked when I’d last eaten. About three hours ago. Well you shouldn’t have eaten for six hours before the scan. Didn’t you get a letter telling you that? No I didn’t and I didn’t get one telling me that with the first appointment which I’d had to rearrange. So it hasn’t just got lost in the post. I was told if the scan didn’t show up what was needed because of it I’d be recalled. How much will that cost the NHS.

Procurement, poor coding and high litigation costs in the NHS are a real problem

NHS Procurement is a joke, a certain number of suppliers monopolise this and can therefore charge extortionate prices

Ah, but think of the potential for lovely backhanders. Hardly a surprise that the NHS needs its very own Counter Fraud Authority, though of course it's claimed that fraud levels are actually "very low"

And I strongly suspect that the CFA has no proper accountability either ...