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.

Alsohuman wait till you or a member of your family goes through what we as a family have been through. Then you might get there is a problem.

Personally I am all for the NHS going. If we all had to use private then they might actually have some accountability.

I know there are problems. Throwing the baby out with the bath water won’t solve them. As I said @oliversmummysarmy, if you can afford private healthcare, use it. The vast majority of us can’t.

Oliversmumsarmy - except they might have no accountability whatsoever to you, if you couldn't afford to pay them upfront and no insurer would touch you with a bargepole. So it may not improve your lot one iota.

Walkaround

It couldn’t get much worse for my Dp.

They refused to prescribe anything more than constipation remedies for months despite asking if he had bowel cancer and having all the symptoms

Diagnosed in A&E. Was given 48hours to live because as well as the cancer which had burst through and gone everywhere, the huge lump that he had on one side of his stomach was a huge abscess on his spleen that was about to burst (one doctor said it was a hernia and had at one point tried to grapple it back inside his stomach).

Ended up paying nearly £80,000 for an operation to buy him more time.

All we are asking for is a doctor to actually listen and a lot of problems could be averted

Oliversmumsarmy - I would say that's negligent practice by anyone's standards. How old is your dp?

I would say that's negligent practice by anyone's standards.

but sadly it appears to be standard nhs treatment.

• 'gatekeeping' gp who don't seem to get that by the time someone bothers to get an appointment with them, they have already self treated with paracetamol & rest (or other otc meds)

Then we have a list of negligent practices over the years.

Dp (late 50s at the time) is just the latest in a long line of incidents that have left people in years of pain or they end up dead

Oliversmumsarmy - negligent practises by the same GP or same GP surgery, or by hundreds of different doctors?
Tbh, my experience has been of unnecessary and invasive testing as part of defensive medicine (ie putting me and my family through extremely traumatic procedures because of the possibility of something known to be exceptionally unlikely), so not the same as yours. Either way, lack of knowledge of the patient does not help - you are more likely either to be too dismissive or too ott, imo.

Different surgeries different doctors over 40 years and 200 miles apart. With a few members of my family.

I have spent 10 years of my life in pain.

Absolute excruciating can’t sleep because of the pain type pain.

Imagine starting now being in that much pain, 24/7 till July 2029.

I walked around with slipped discs for 7 years. I had zimmerframe and dc 2x2 years and under.

I got a diagnosis in 15 minutes when I went to see a private osteopath.

I was supposedly under one of the leading back specialists in an orthopaedic hospital.

This consultant never in 7 years of seeing him every 3 months actually glanced at me let alone examine me.

He would just bark questions and write sitting at his desk. Never once looking up.

I have met quite a few people who have been under this consultant.

Not one had a good word to say about him.

In fact one said she would advise anyone to live with the pain you have than go and see this guy who just succeeded in making her pain worse, then having to have further operations to put right the mess he made the first time.

And if you try to find out what he did wrong he either refuses to engage with you or your notes suddenly disappear.

A relative had similar problems with back pain and other symptoms and after several years of just being sent off with increasingly strong painkillers and the doctor refusing to refer her for any tests or other treatment, was finally sent for scans and told she needed surgery and probably had permanent nerve damage. To be fair, back pain can be extremely difficult to manage and people often wrongly believe surgery will help when frequently it either doesn't help or exacerbates the problem. Some people can walk around with slipped discs for years and not even realise, because they don't cause them any problems. I hope your symptoms have been relieved at least to some extent, Oliversmumsarmy. I think access to things like physiotherapy is particularly dire on the NHS.

OP as someone with chronic health issues yes I do, I really do. I had complications after day surgery a couple of years ago and they didn't have a bed for me so I remained firstly in a&e before surgery then afterwards in theatre recovery - a bed didn't become available until right at the end of my week stay and even then I was discharged before it was clinically ideal.

What I will say though is I appreciate every single one of you for what you do - you people are what is holding it together for the patients and I'm really scared because it will get to the point where you can't anymore.

Although I got told off by my rheumatologist last week because I had a bad fall several weeks back and didn't get it checked - I figured I could still walk to meh... she thought I had a broken hip 😳

Back problems are terrible to diagnose especially if no one actually looks at your back.

I think access to things like physiotherapy is particularly dire on the NHS.

So why is it in my local HA they insist on you seeing a physio for any musculo skeletal pain (apart from a break) before they can refer you to the relevant specialist - only the physio department can do that now. I was referred to physio about 4-5 times for my back pain before they then referred me to the pain clinic for nerve blocks. I had "what do you expect at your age?" from one (53 at the time), back pain classes with exercises, acupuncture, recommendation to buy a TENS machine, ultrasound, refusal to do any massage type work even though that had been proved to help. Then EVENTUALLY referral to pain clinic. This lot was with arthritis, 2 prolapsed discs and a misplaced vertebra.

Oliversmumsarmy - the symptoms described are normally enough to decide a slipped disc or discs are the likely cause! Are you sure the consultant did not already know you probably had slipped discs? What treatment had he offered? Or did he just bark at you, make notes and then do nothing at all?

People turning to an accident and emergency for general practice medicine is a problem for everyone as millions £ are wasted

ivy but what do you do if you can't get a gp appointment? or only one in 6 weeks time? or the gp doesn't even look at you anf tells you to take paracetamol and rest?

Allergictoironing - huh, I'm still waiting for access to physio. Mind you, there's general physio and specialist physio. Our surgery even used to offer osteopathy, but not any more. Problem is, eg, someone with ligamentous laxity (hypermobility) may not be best treated in the same way as a less hypermobile person. Physiotherapists who have not specialised may not actually always provide the most effective treatment! And some parts of the body - eg hands - may require more specialist knowledge, too.

Physio is really good here. I had a frozen shoulder. All cured by a series of physio appointments and Naproxen.

Orange
Change gp
I’ve never waited for more than 48 hours to get an appointment.
I can book online, just looked & can get one on Tuesday afternoon. They do Monday clinics for walk in and book - so if urgent I could go tomorrow morning and queue
Turning up at hospital with a pain in arm after 2 months isn’t resnable

@mummyontherocks your plan would leave people like me and dd utterly screwed! Both disabled with chronic pain conditions, I'm on benefits and also seriously mentally ill, she's on nmw!

"but sadly it appears to be standard nhs treatment.

• 'gatekeeping' gp who don't seem to get that by the time someone bothers to get an appointment with them, they have already self treated with paracetamol & rest (or other otc meds)" absolutely my experience!

Time wasted by GP's giving it "have you tried X y standard home remedies for what might initially seem to be z Minor ailment" when I wouldn't (and I suspect a good number of patients are the same) have made a bloody GP appointment unless I had already tried that and symptoms were ongoing, usually worsening, and I'm concerned something else may be the cause.

Or EVEN time wasted on not accepting that I KNOW my body.

Eg I'm prone to tonsillitis, get it at least once every winter, mostly it's fine being treated with home/Otc remedies but on several occasions it's been bacterial and required antibiotics to treat. I KNOW when it's headed this way because of the particular colour in my throat and because I get a certain, unmistakeable, sharp pain on the right side of my throat in a certain area that EVERY time I've had this, it's turned out to be bacterial and murder to treat. BUT every time I make a GP appointment when it's like this (which is maybe every 2-3 years it happens) and I EXPLAIN that I've already tried home remedies, that particular symptoms have always in the past turned out to be proven to be a bacterial infection - they DON'T LISTEN! I'm fobbed off with painkillers/linctus - and yes I've tried rejecting these options or not collecting prescriptions but then I get "told off" for not "trying them" even though I KNOW they're a waste of money, only to end up having AT LEAST one more gp appointment where they eventually CONSIDER doing a swab and eventually prescribe antibiotics, at which point the meds work very quickly in clearing the problem up. If they listened to me in the first place - which they could also double check by checking my records (which seem to be very difficult to do any kind of "refined search" on for some reason), accepted that I had ALREADY tried home remedies etc AND that I know my body and gave me the antibiotics when needed they would save AT LEAST the cost of an additions GP appointment and the cost of the useless meds.

This is not brain surgery - it's common bloody sense!

If we had the "old style" GP practice of seeing the same dr consistently, they would know which patients are ones to worry unnecessarily, and which are the ones who rarely go to GP and so when they do its generally with good reason! They would know which patients are tuned in to their own bodies, and which are those who are switched on with self care/understand home remedies.

I also have missing notes, major gaps in the info regarding my lung and gynae problems.

And it's too damn hard to get rid of bad medics too! Even hcps know this - it's why whistle blowing is so rare!

Negligent practice? My entire medical history is full of it. Dds is definitely headed that way too. Same for several friends and relatives too - I'm aware of at least 2 cases similar to @oliversmumsarmy where patients presented early on with clear symptoms of the cancer they had, who were fobbed off repeatedly until there was nothing could be done. They were "officially" referred onto the cancer specialist in the right time frame - once the symptoms were so bad a&e visits were happening and it was the a&e Drs that started the ball rolling. So in the stats they were dealt with "appropriately" in reality far from.

It's not only poor in terms of patient care, it's wasteful, inefficient practice.

Orange
Change gp

yea cos it's that easy!

Where I am you get the Spanish bloody inquisition if you even consider this!

Plus all the GP surgeries round here have the same issues - not enough GP's, not enough appointments, GP's that don't listen, massive reluctance to refer to specialists.

So changing surgery is pointless.

It was pretty obvious to me as a foreigner that the NHS is severely under funded. No amount of negligence and general poor culture could possibly account for how shit it is. I wouldn’t necessarily blame people going into A&E though. Doctors appointments are difficult if not impossible to get in many areas and private GPs can be difficult to get to/too expensive for many people to go to without saving up first (not to mention a lot ofbritish people are selfish morons who think they’re entitled to free healthcare).