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.

It's an alien experience to me, too, this inability to see a GP at all and I live in a part of the country with one of the lowest numbers of GPs per head of population. Yes, standard appointments are booked up weeks ahead, but emergency appointments for acute problems are available daily, and locums have been employed to help clear backlogs when appointment waiting times are getting ridiculous. Seeing a GP of your choice, who actually knows you, is almost impossible unless you want to wait weeks or keep ringing up for last minute cancelled appointments, but getting access to any old GP rather than hanging around in A&E for a clearly inappropriate problem I have never found difficult.

@Alsohuman part of the reason why private healthcare is so expensive is that the NHS has massively reduced the market. If people were charged to use the NHS then lots of affordable private options would spring up because they would actually be able to compete.

BogglesGoggles - yeah, right. It doesn't work like that in the US - if it's cheap, it's because you don't get much cover for anything, not because it's competitive. Loads of hugely wealthy doctors and pharmaceutcal companies, though, and a huge captive audience to rip off. So I hope you aren't thinking of that model.

So changing surgery is pointless.

It certainly wasn’t for me, I went from not being able to get an appointment, never seeing a gp and indifferent receptionists - to a fabulous gp practice where I can book an appointment on line this afternoon with a gp on Tuesday afternoon, really great receptionists.

If you don’t think it’ll make a difference then fine - don’t change

When you read all these different accounts, i.e. some GP surgeries good, others bad, Physio hard to get in some areas, others easy, etc., you realise what a cock-up it all is.

IF the NHS is so good, then surely the standards should be the same wherever you get NHS treatment? Why is there so much local variation if it's a "national" service?

Loads of reasons, Kazzyhoward, not least that different parts of the country have different demographics. This is a divided country in a great many ways. People don't understand each other's different experiences of daily life.

Kazzyhoward never heard the term "postcode lottery"? Areas all have their own health authorities under the NHS umbrella, and within very broad rules allocate their budgets as they see fit. So while in one area a certain drug/treatment is available easily, in others you have to be near death's door before they will start to jump through the hoops you need to get approval for it.

Often this local allocation of facilities and funds can mean they are in direct contradiction of clinical best practice e.g. Kent are going to reduce the number of stroke centres to 3 in Dartford, Maidstone & Ashford. This leaves patients in south and east Kent more than an hour by ambulance away from such a centre, whereas treatment should be within an hour to ensure a decent result.

Well, the French system uses up a higher proportion of GDP, but in return gets proportionately more GPs, hospital beds, nurses and midwives for its population. Drugs also cost less to the French system. The French system is also suffering under the burden of an increasingly decrepit and growing elderly population, and a growing number of people with multiple chronic disabilities, though. In all honesty, since an awful lot of the problems in the NHS have been caused by deliberate and harmful change instigated by politicians rather than by the concept that UK citizens should benefit from good healthcare free at the point of use, I think learning from the way countries other than the US structure their healthcare systems would be a very good thing. Free after reimbursement, after all, is still free, just more administratively burdensome, an issue for the poorest, and not necessarily the reason some things work better elsewhere. Opening the UK health market up to a free for all smash and grab raid by US profit-making companies under the pretence that we need more of that sort of "competition" is the last thing we need.

Walkaround

My diagnosis was I needed a new hip so gave me physio for my hip.

Said I wouldn’t get a new hip until I was 60.

Oliversmumsarmy -

Agree with posters about the US system. The most expensive in the world and many citizens can't get it. Friends of ours needed medical help in New York. Despite having full travel insurance, after waiting over four hours in Emergency, they risked flying home.

The French system has much to commend it. I may be out of date now but at one time individuals paid 22% of their earnings for health care. More importantly 98% pay it.

22% is a lot to ask of a graduate paying back the university loan and saving up for a house deposit and/or paying high rent.

Would be a lot, I mean.

If it was suggested that people pay more tax and it would go into the NHS, would be people be happy to pay more to get a better system ?

How many people voted for brexit mainly on the basis that the nhs would get more money?

People need to vote for candidates/parties who want to invest in the NHS.

If it was suggested that people pay more tax and it would go into the NHS, would be people be happy to pay more to get a better system ?

Labour increased NIC to "save the NHS" and trebled it's spending in a decade. Still not enough apparently. Without reform, it'll never end. Tax rises every year or two to keep up with the leaky bucket.

What a load of bollocks @BogglesGoggles.

Kazzyhoward - with an increasingly elderly population with complex needs and growing numbers of young people with complex needs, costs will indeed continue to grow massively, leaky bucket or not.

with an increasingly elderly population with complex needs and growing numbers of young people with complex needs, costs will indeed continue to grow massively, leaky bucket or not.

All the more reason to fix the bucket. Otherwise with the additional needs you rightly mention, we'll just be replacing the leaky bucket with a bigger leaky bucket losing even more! How about replacing it with a bucket with fewer leaks.

Yesterday I went out for a long and lazy brunch with some friends. ‘I hate the NHS’ one of them complained.
‘Oh god I know’ another (non English friend - student) added ‘in my country it’s ALOT better than this’.

On went the NHS bashing until I asked the first girl. ‘Why?’

And suddenly the whole table were spouting off;

• crazy wait times
• lack of supplies
• prescription charges

....and on and on

Me- ‘But not the actual Dr’s and Nurses right?’
‘No they’re amazing’
Me- ‘So EVERYTHING you have an issue with is funding/supply related’

The group conferred for a moment before unanimously agreeing.

Me- ‘And who allocates funding for the NHS?’

‘The government’

Me- ‘so why do you say you hate the NHS, instead of the government?’

Silence... and confused faces.

Exactly!! People talk about the NHS as if it were an independent organisation! They seem to forget its government owned, government run and government controlled. Well apart from the bits being slowly but surely sold off, but they keep quiet about that.