AIBU to be furious that in 24hrs the NHS as we know it will be gone? (England)

[Leaningtoweroflisa]

Yes I know orangerevel has beaten me to it and this is her thread to push for our responses on the extraordinarily poorly handled consultation on the NHS mandate, which closes tomorrow and which is a transparent move towards privitisation.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2512051-To-ask-how-you-feel-about-the-NHS

But this is sooo urgent that I fel justified in making a TAAT to continue to raise awareness. The consultation document links are in the link above. I will put them in at the end of this post for those who CBA to click through.

The consultation document is very very poorly written. Completely in political spin management type speak that is meaningless when you parse through it to work out what is actually being said. As a senior clinician in the NHS it made me so furious that I felt sick, because I have the joy of dealing with this sort of bullshit day in and day out.

It promises nothing and threatens to further reduce what services are provided by the NHS. There is no mention of restoring the secretary of states for health's legal duty to provide services (removed in the 2012 Act). There is no mention of maintaining safe staffing levels (and there are hints of further plans that will further impact on frontline staff's time to do their job of caring for patients). There is bare faced hypocrisy as public health funding has been slashed.

Please take 30 mins out of your day to respond, even just to put n the forms that this is not acceptable - NHS England need to extend the consultation period and adequately publicise the process; that they need to write the document in meaningful English and aims and objectives that are real and measurable and anything that indicates your feelings about keeping the NHS from being sold off and degraded into a USA model based insurance system? Because that's the model that's coming - not any of the European insurance based models that can and do deliver a part-private service with good health outcomes in an affordable way...

consultation page

our NHS sample response

I'm just about to crank the laptop up and respond after I've had some lunch.

Thanks for the reminder, have submitted comments now. Hate this government so much

Done and sent.

Thanks, have submitted comments.

Going to read and respond now. I wish I felt more optimistic that it would do something. Maybe if somebody turned it into a facebook personality quiz that told you which anthropomorphic Disney animal you are or something.

Ugh.

I responded - took some doing. You're quite right, the manager-babble on the form is something else. So I just told them what I thought!

No doubt I will get flamed for this but as long as healthcare stays free, good quality and available to all I could not care less whether it's delivered by private providers or a state monopoly. No-one wants a system like the US but plenty of European countries successfully blend state, private and charity provision and I don't see why this is considered so heretical.

Thanks for this.

I was sent the link by a nurse friend last week, but found the wording inaccessible in any meaningful way, so again, just responded with what I thought in general. A sample response is perfect to help guide me in my answers. I haven't sent it in yet.

I was really cross when I read it, they have deliberately made it non-sensical and so full of jargon that is is difficult to understand what they mean. (Other than we are trying to make this too hard for you to respond to).

No doubt I will get flamed for this but as long as healthcare stays free, good quality and available to all I could not care less whether it's delivered by private providers or a state monopoly

The problem is that private providers are in the game to make a profit. This may come at the expense of both quality and of "low profit" services.

At least one of the questions, I answered with:
I am unsure how to answer this. I don't even know what it means.

Done

Thank you for the reminder. Logged in and submitted ojections.

As the quality is patchy at best at the moment, and I come from a system run very successfully by private insurers, I don't really see what the problem is.

Will it be like when the post office was privatised? There was a lot of rending of garments for a while and then it was just business as usual...

Done
I have commented on the other thread that I think the consultation paper was deliberately vague to deter people from commenting.

Please tell everyone you can think of. Put it on your Facebook.

I have just read on MN that it closes TODAY. Sneaky bastards.

I just wrote what I thought. The form is designed for organisations, not for patients.

Tenders distort how services are delivered. They are delivered to bring about the maximum pay out, not the best service for the patient. I personally know of many examples where this has happened, but can't say because of confidentiality. But privatisation is not in our best interests.

I've done.

I am an uninformed layperson with no axe to grind other than watching family members at work in the NHS and knowing how bloody tough it is. And being grateful every day for the NHS in the ways it keeps us all alive in this country.

I used and rewrote the sample response. The "consultation document" itself was nonsensical to me.

Loathe Jeremy Hunt and all the weasel ways of this poxy government. Off to tweet about it now...

Done.
And shared on Facebook

YANBU. It is a completely unreasonable situation. They are fucking bastards who don't give a flying fuck about anyone who isn't "one of them".

Back to Victorian Britain with you all! :(

Othehugemanatee, this is why private involvement in the NHS needs to be avoided: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-30740956

The reason why it matters whether it's private or state:

private companies are profit driven, that is their key objective.
costs of medical treatment will be as high as they can make them; the insurers pay; the insurers get paid of course and take their cut. It inflates the cost of the whole thing.

the way treatment is delivered is different too: it's a sales model; the customer is always right. If I went to my GP and demanded some trendy drug that wasn't useful for me, I'd be told to get lost. If I asked a private physician in the US to indulge my desires for trendy drugs I think I'd get a lot further with it. Hence the consumer ads for prescription drugs - blows my mind that it is worth someone's while to spend astronomical amounts on marketing drugs to patients - who in theory do not have prescribing power - but clearly they effectively do as it is worth their while to advertise to them at great expense.

Upshot

If you live in the US you will be looking at a very significant monthly 4 figure sum to insure you and your family for healthcare. My family and I are already effectively insured for a lot less than that out of my monthly pay packet, and I'm higher rate. Because I'm not paying the entrepreneurs taking their cut.

Oh also while I'm ranting about the US, their peri-natal statistics are appalling. Probably because they include significant numbers of patients who have not been able to afford proper ante-natal care, as well all get for free in this country.

I filled this in and thought the same as you! What a load of guff.

Particularly worrying were the parts about how they would assess how NHS England was performing without stating what they were going to assess and how exactly!! So it was all about performance without stating what they considered was good performance?!

Very top heavy, management centric and not at all about the changes that need to be made for patient-centric care.

I also answered one question with: you haven't made it clear what objectives you have, so I can't answer this.

And it talked about 'digital and technology' twice when I think they meant 'digital technology'. Poor editing - like they didn't even bother to read it over. It's totally meaningless to them!!

I thought it might be a scam at one point!! Typical tory management guff.

And nowhere did it state AT ALL what their Five Year Forward Plan was that they kept saying they would like to initiate. Dodgy.

My response is in now! It's closing tonight around midnight, so I'm glad I saw this today!