If the tories lose the next election, will the NHS be safe?

[YearOfTheRear]

Just that, really... I feel so worried for my young family at the moment. The state of healthcare in this country is getting quite frightening. Will we actually be able to sleep reasonably soundly if the conservatives don't get back in?

The NHS has been complained about for decades, regardless of who was in power. Some people have short memories. Don't forget it was Blair who changed all the dentist contracts in mid 2000s which left many patients without NHS dental care. The Blair government also closed my local A&E along with others and made them " urgent care" centres. Not to mention the PFI which is still being paid off and will be for many decades.
Moving forward, we have a crisis in social care, frail, elderly, dementia ridden patients being pumped with antibiotics to keep them alive and suffering in misery.
A huge and growing obesity crisis, costing the NHS billions and billions, the result of the Nanny state and people no longer being required to take responsibility for their own health and welfare.
A burgeoning mental health crisis which (in my humble opinion) is fuelled by the mollycoddling of young people, social media, and the lax attitude around drugs.
I could go on but I can already sense my arse being handed to me
(BTW I'm no died-in-the-wool Tory but I have been around a long time and have observed many of the societal shifts which I believe are the cause of some of the mess we are in now)

I used to write costings for medical research. The finance department in my hospital didn't even have a price list for anything. It is so disorganised and there is so much waste. I could write a book.

I have worked through 4 major reorganisations. It makes no difference.
I have had wonderful treatment as an outpatient over the last few years, but I would be very scared to be an inpatient.

We need to start again, explain to the public that it isn't actually free and that we need to come up with a fair way to pay and a fair way to decide on priorities.

There was a post, today, following Wes Streeting's conference speech, in the below the line comments from the Times (London) which suggested that National Insurance (NI) should be retitled as a health tax. It is supposed to fund health (and social) care so it should be explicitly designated as that, and ring fenced for health and social care. Every procedure and consultatation should carry a £fee cost, so people understand that the NHS is not free to use, but paid for by their NI contribution. If the link was explicit, and the money followed it, then I like to think more people would think harder about the decisions.

No.

1. NHS wastes so much money
2. ageing population needing it
3. an entitled society that uses it & ambulances for neither an accident nor an emergency

@StarDolphins , not entirely sure which post you are commenting on with your last remark.

The NHS is wasteful. Not many people would disagree with that.

We currently have a top heavy ageing population, thanks to the NHS getting so good at keeping people alive. The quality of those lives is open to debate. But if their families can't or won't step up to fill in the gaps, who would you designate for the role?

I don't think entitlement is the whole issue on your third point, although it's probably a part of it. I'd like to think that an all out assault on obesity could make a dent in the Type 2 diabetes figures. Type 2 diabetes absorbs 10% of NHS spend now, and that could be diverted to better use. I live near a city that is notorious for obesity. I see too many people, much younger than me, riding around on powered wheelchairs, disabled by obesity. It's not a rich prosperous city with high paid jobs going vacant, so saying get a better job is not an option.

Labour did a far better job with the NHS than the Tories have done. Waiting times were much lower for a start.
we do indeed spend less per head on health than other developed nations.
it would really helped if people looked after themselves, starting with not being obese and having type 2 diabetes, which costs billions. Of course there are loads of health conditions you can do nothing about, but there’s a lot you can do to
protect your health

Labour did a far better job with the NHS than the Tories have done. Waiting times were much lower for a start

In part because they "sold" (or should that be "outsourced") chunks of lists to the private sector. It wasn't because the NHS was doing more.
That's part of the problem - a metric fuckton of smoke and mirrors

It is still the fact that right now the NHS is absorbing about 38% of all the tax being paid by everyone, and it is performing atrociously against other comparable developed economies. It has become a sacred cow.

The Tories would love to privatise the NHS. I think your worries lie elsewhere.

Until the general public get there head’s out of there arses and realise it’s not just about more money
the service needs a complete overhaul practically every interaction with the health service has been good but extremely inefficient Ans wasted a fortune

there is definitely some avoidable health issues by better choices

but the thing is we just love to point the finger of blame rather than look at ourselves and see what part we play in this

Anyone with a brain would "privatise" UK healthcare, along European lines, not US model. French, Belgian and German healthcare is better funded, better delivered and has better outcomes after serious illness.

Absolutely not.

The NHS is failing because it is badly run, wasteful & dysfunctional and simply throwing ever more money at it isn’t going to change that. Labour has indicated that it understands this, but is still far from bringing forward any plans to actually change it.

The NHS needs fundamental, structural reform and Britain needs to learn from other countries which have much better universal healthcare systems than we do. Germany, Israel & Australia being obvious examples. The problem with this, of course, is that unions & other vested interests who want to block reform will immediately start bleating about ‘privatisation’, or making ignorant comparisons with the US which is one of the very few developed countries which has an even more dysfunctional system than ours.

No I'm not rich. that's why I said I would get private healthcare if I could.

I don't think any party will rescue the NHS. It's been abused and mismanaged beyond survival. Unfortunately it is people like yourself who will bear the brunt and I'm very sorry you're so worried.

We’ll look at what’s happened to the NHS under tory rule. Most people I know have to go private to get seen.

I think the NHS has already been destroyed by successive governments.

No of course it won't, unless labour can turn around inflation, make the COVID and other debts disappear and be able to raise taxes.
There is a real recruitment crisis coupled by an aging population.they have a different funding system in Canada, but they are completely struggling too.

But people like @isittheholidaysyet will not be disadvantaged by a reform along European health care lines, because nobody can be refused health insurance on the grounds of pre-existing conditions in European social insurance programmes. The companies cannot refuse to cover you. It is not permissable to pick and choose who you will or won't cover to flatter your profit figures. It's for the insurance company to manage your case well, so they still make a tiny profit on their input, multipled x 000. That's the difference.

@Libertass I am quietly optimistic that both parties are starting to think that putting healthcare outside party politics is the only way forward. It is simply too important for all of us to be a political football.

I live in Wales where Labour controls the NHS. It’s crumbling massively faster than it is in England. I can’t get treatment for myself or my kids on life changing matters - treatment that is available across the board in England.

Im on waiting list for mental health support- 3 years wait. I’m on waiting list for gynae treatment - min 2 years wait.

The staff are excellent but Labour have repeatedly screwed it over and turned blind eyes to all of the problems.

Google NHS last year's of Blair, never seen anything like it.
Agree it needs to total change and reform it's a disgrace.

Wales is a pretty good example of a Labour run NHS.

The Welsh government has been Labour for 20+ years.

As a devolved administration, they receive proportionately the same funding as England have allocated to health services. It is then entirely up to them how they spend it, and indeed whether they even spend it all on health at all.

After 20 years of making their own funding decisions with the same allocated budget, Wales now has more than 27,000 people waiting over 2 years for treatment. The whole of England has just 277 in this category.

On average across all waiting lists, patients wait 5 weeks longer for treatment in Wales than they do in England.

AND……the real kicker……in 2021, the Welsh government returned £155 million of their allocated funds back to Westminster because they hadn’t managed to spend it within the allocated tax year.

So it can’t even be claimed that there’s some level of unfairness of the overall budget levels allocated to Wales.

The nhs costs more than NIC raised, and that’s not including state benefits. So paying all NIC raised into the nhs actually reduces its funding.

The NHS already takes 38% of all the tax paid in this country. Under the current conservative plan, it would expand to take 49%. That is completely unsustainable.

It is forth or fifth (depending on how you calculate it) employer in the WORLD. That is so incredible it feels like it can’t be true but it actually is. The only larger employers are 2 Multi National companies (MacDonalds and Walmart - Asda in this country) and the armed forces of China and the US and possibly the Indian railway - all countries with populations and land mass several thousands of times larger than tiny Britain.

1 in 17 people in this country work for the NHS. Under the current conservative plan, that will reach 1 in 11.

This is frankly ridiculous and anyone who thinks this is a ‘underfunding’ issue is quite frankly an idiot. Whilst people continue with the myth that the NHS is the “envy of the world” (it isn’t) nothing will change. It is typical of British arrogance that we think an old, antiquated, totally unfit for the modern world system and something that NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD even attempts is somehow better and something that others want to emulate …. they don’t. We could copy the French / German / Australian model but we won’t because of the usual scaremongering that poorer people or those with preexisting conditions will be left to die - this doesn’t happen in any of those countries - but don’t let facts get in the way. I really really hope the labour govt are elected because when the NHS continues to fail maybe just maybe proper reform will finally be accepted. No doubts it will be blamed on the Tory’s by the die hard labour supporters who like to ignore the fact that the Labour fucked up dentistry all by themselves and cost the tax payer millions of wasted money on PFI (not their fault apparently/ no choice 🥺 but to sign insane wasteful unsustainable deals with the private sector) and only managed to keep the NHS going by throwing money at it in the most globally prosperous decade when they happen to be in power but who cares if it means something can actually get done.

I work for the NHS (backroom, not frontline, not management though I have managed a team in the past) and strongly believe in its principles but there's no doubt it is going to have to change to survive.

We are going to have to change too. It isn't only patients who are getting older, the staff are too, hence recruitment drives to countries like the Philippines and other locations.

We are all going to have to take more responsibility for what we eat and how we exercise, assuming we have that control and the ability to afford it. There is likely to be a hardening of attitudes towards smoking, drinking alcohol and other harmful behaviours.

Much harder decisions will also need to be taken about what drugs and treatments get funded. It's going to be much more like it was when my parents were young during the depression of the 1930s, with elements of the American system almost certainly.

There are other imminent changes which are long overdue like standardisation of uniforms in England which will save millions once they have been implemented. And AI is going to have to help make more decisions, it's already being used in some areas to great effect.

I wouldn't currently take out private health insurance but I haven't ruled it out in future. Even with private cover, though, or a US style copayer arrangement, there still won't be enough clinical professionals to go round. And what people often forget is that there are no private A and Es so if you're in an accident, say, it's still the NHS who will treat you, at least initially. Private companies can also afford to be very selective about what conditions they treat and you'd better make sure you take that insurance out while you're still young, healthy and cheap to treat.

I would, however, like to see far less politically correct late to the party posturing going on. I don't mind wearing a name and ID badge but I fail to see how having my pronouns on display helps patient care. Unfortunately I currently come under the jurisdiction of a team whose reason for existing is pretty much pronouns and other high profile virtue signalling and it drives me up the wall.

This.

This. No amount of money can save it in its current format. So much money gets wasted.