The NHS is falling apart

[Hold34]

I know there are many wonderful caring staff out there working in the NHS.

But overall, it's a bit shit isn't it? It's (mostly) not the fault of the staff. It's just underfunded and can't deliver what it needs to meet demand.

We all have to pretend it's great but it's not.

It most certainly is underfunded and the staffing shortages are real and very serious. Anyone who pretends the NHS is doing just fine is deluding themselves. I say that as someone who has left nursing after 26 years because I couldn’t bear to see the terrible effects of the austerity measures. Dh is a hospital consultant his mantra is “don’t get sick it’s bloody dangerous being in a hospital these days”.
Yes we are good at cancer care once a diagnosis is made, we could do a whole lot better at making the diagnosis earlier though.
But as long as people keep sticking their fingers in their ears and singing la la la then the Government will continue to ignore the crisis.

There are inefficiencies, there are systems which could be changed. However, working in intensive care, I have seen a person on a bed, having their life saved, still with their work clothes and boots on, because they were so ill there wasn't time to undress them. That person got the care of several doctors, nurses, ACCPs, immediately. That's how it works, really.

In intensive care, ward rounds with a consultant are twice per day. Blood tests are processed within a couple of hours. Microbiology rounds take place so that patients are on the very best antibiotics for their condition. Pharmacists visit daily. Physiotherapists come and mobilise patients and even ventilated patients get sat up on the edge of the bed, so they don't waste. A psychologist comes to assess and advise on the mental health of patients as requested. Consultants from all over the hospital will come and see patients if they fall under their specialty. That's because those patients are the most in need.

If you go to A&E with a splinter in your finger, you'll wait hours. If you go when you're acutely ill, you will get seen incredibly quickly.

No it isn’t shit. No it isn’t falling apart. Don’t let the Daily Fail let you believe it is.

Watched numerous druggies get seen to first in case they cause a scene.

🙄 Amazing how you can know the details of every other person in the room. Or was this just an assumption based on your own prejudices? When people bring the “druggies get.....” in to arguments, safe to say they have lost.

If it cannot perform without risking lives, it needs to change.

Doctors and nurses risk lives every day. It’s rarely as simple as x will work, y won’t.

It is a human organisation, mistakes will be made. But there were around 17k claims of negligence against the NHS in 2017. The majority were closed with no payout. Given the number of people they treat every day, that’s a really small number.

The problem is we are led to think these kinds of things happen every day because those are the ones splashed in the tabloids and raised in threads like these. People are far less likely to post about that time the NHS just did ok.

It is overstretched, but at the same time, it's been good to me and my family. My mum is a recovering alcoholic. A couple of years ago, she was hospitalised at Addenbrooke's due to a binge. The staff there were really kind and not judgemental or rude at all. St Bart's also looked after my brother when he had cancer.

Also, I thought private hospitals didn't deal with emergencies?

f you go to A&E with a splinter in your finger, you'll wait hours. If you go when you're acutely ill, you will get seen incredibly quickly.

It really annoys me when people say this. It is not true. Maybe sometimes, or most of the time. But certainly not all of the time.

We’re the problem though. Not everyone of us of course but patients behaviour is not sensible.

We don’t recognise preventative healthcare.
We don’t turn up for appointments.
We don’t comply with treatment plans.
We don’t look after our health at home.
We don’t attend screening appointments. See point 1.

Most people who could, don’t claim negligence because the NHS is seen as sacred.

It has been massively underfunded. The amount of patients and complexity of people's medical history's gets greater each year but we have had years of cutbacks and 'efficiency savings'

Working on the frontline I give it my.all, leave late every night( as do all of my team) and I feel like my head is spinning from the pace of just training to do my job. The nhs runs hugely on goodwill of staff missing breaks, leaving late etc all unpaid overtime. It's getting to the point staff are burning out.
My hospital had no patient beds the other day meaning it was full and they had nowhere to put new admissions meaning they start looking at who they can safely send home rushing them out. This used to happen during busy winter months but now sadly it's the norm.

Yes there is huge room for improvement but proper investment is needed.

It's inevitable service will be poorer and mistakes made with less staff and beds. The government are deliberately underfunding it to the point it will break and be swiftly privatised for the Tories to cash in on.

The NHS is moderately adequate at best. There are pockets and hospitals which offer amazing care but it’s at the mercy of staffing shortages and financial limitations.

Cancer care for anything other than bog standard common and early cancers is absolutely at the mercy of postcode lottery. There are a large number of effective and proven drugs which are standard of care across the world which are not accessible on the NHS.

Wait times are appalling, the administration and ridiculous processes are unbelievably inefficient.

We have private healthcare. On a general level you miss out on all the ridiculous paperwork - ring up, book appointment, get seen by the same person every time and have continuity of care.

My husband has advanced stage 4 cancer. The care he has received privately is on a whole other level to what he would receive NHS, we started out on the NHS. He has had a whole range of successful treatments which simply wouldn’t be offered on the NHS.

The NHS is great, it's the government that is shit and not fit for purpose.

I was in hospital all day yesterday with my son. The staff were amazing.

It’s under funded. Deliberately so. Full stop

It isn't, it's misused. A and E is packed with minor complaints that at one time would have a plaster on, drunks who should be in a place where they can sober up at their own rate, a large police cell maybe.
The NHS is wasting time on vanity projects, ears pinned back, bigger boobs, all in the name of 'self-esteem'. You don't like your body, tough, live with it.
People who have 'addictions' such as gambling, hoarding that are now dumped on the NHS unnecessarily.
If the NHS were to stick to making sick people better there wouldn't be shortages.

I think the whole has needs looking at. More staff and less mangers, a nationwide funding policy so not a post code lottery on things like ivf.
Anything that is available to buy over the counter shouldn’t be available on prescription. Charges if you fail to attend an appointment or return loaned equipment.
The whole thing is not fit for the modern day which is not surprising as medicine has moved on since the nhs came into existence.

Considering the astounding level of underfunding, what the NHS does with the money it has is frankly incredible. And I accept that there is a degree of wastage, you show me a behemoth of an organisation where there isn't.
But what they do in the face of a government hell bent in destroying it is nothing short of miraculous.

It varies. Mostly, care of people who are seriously ill is superb, and that everyone can access this care free at the point of use is a market if a civilised society.

But a lot of the systems are bloated and inefficient, and where one service is underfunded this leads to backlogs and waste elsewhere.

My current experience:

I presented at 10 weeks pregnant at GP with antenatal depression. They have referred me to an O&G Psychology service where I will be treated by very highly qualified staff. This is amazing. I wouldn't be able to afford it privately. But. There is a waiting list, of course. While I am on the waiting list, I have to be seen once a fortnight ago they can check I'm not going to top myself (I'm not, but I'm not well enough to work either). I'm also attending my other antenatal care appointments. Because "ante natal depression" is in my notes, all the HCPs I see for scans etc have to check in with how I'm doing (best practice, to be fair). Unfortunately, continuity of care is not prioritised in the NHS, it's just too big a system.

The result of this is that I have now had to have extremely personal, revealing conversations about my mental health with a total of 11 strangers, I've only seen the same GP more than once. Many of the staff who have had to quiz me about it are not specialists in MH. One midwife rolled her eyes as she read my notes then treated me like a 4 year old. I've been off work 6 weeks now. If anything, I'm getting worse not better. I've been assessed 3 times. I have yet to access any treatment (although hopefully this will be starting in about 3 weeks or so). If the O&G Psychology service did not have a waiting list, I might have been fixed by now...

Fwiw I'm very well aware that being able to access MH care within 4 months of requesting it makes me a lottery winner.

If you go to A&E with a splinter in your finger, you'll wait hours. If you go when you're acutely ill, you will get seen incredibly quickly.

This is simply not true in all cases, and is a gross oversimplification. Last brush I had with A +E was a four hour wait in the worst pain I'd ever had in my entire life. Seven hours later I was eventually diagnosed with life threatening conditions (at which point some of the staff looked like they might shit themselves as the penny dropped about the cause of such severe pain) and was in hospital for the next two weeks. 'Incredibly quickly' my arse, and I most certainly didn't have a fucking splinter in my finger. It was dangerous and incredibly distressing.

I've found there to be a lack of accountability when mistakes are made. Yes I know people will say there are many patients who receive care without mistakes, but that doesn't lower the impact for those who are negatively affected.

My nan was taken into a&e, I can't fault the paramedics and emergency team. However, once she was stable and admitted on a ward for tests and investigations, it was a bit of a shambles. She was misdiagnosed and treated for the wrong thing, and one day I went in they started talking about a completely different diagnosis as though the first one had never existed (very 'eastasia/eurasia'). I asked the consultant 3 times what happened to the previous diagnosis (as in was this new diagnosis in addition or insteas of) and she actually ignored me and just didn't look up until I stopped asking and moved on to something else.
Of course human error occurs, but the lack of accountability makes it worse.

Similar has happened to my dp (misdiagnosed for a year, still doesn't have a diagnosis 4 years later because they don't think investigating with scans etc is necessary, lives in agony). We are trying to go private, but honestly we're not in a great financial position to do so.
Whenever he goes for a consultation they push ADs on him and focus on stress and depression instead of the actual physical problems which are making him depressed.

Know many other people in similar situations, who have symptoms without an 'easily' diagnosed cause (mainly abdominal issues in my exp). Some who can afford to go private and get the result they need, others who can't afford it and just need to put up and shut up.

I just wonder whether additional funding would indeed fix the problems, or whether the decision making would mean additional funds are wasted.

I worked in a private hospital in the USA. I saw some appallingly bad care.
The NHS is good in many respects, but funding is concentrated in a few popular areas.
Mental health and chronic disease management is badly underfunded, the referral and booking systems are dreadful.
GP services are in disarray.
Consultants have had their secretarial support decimated and many of them are hot desking, which is ridiculous for people with that level of responsibility and heavy workload.

Another one here who thinks it could be better managed, not that it is underfunded. My DH works across all the hospitals in his trust and sees some shocking financial decisions being made. He tells me that the finance meetings he attends are battle grounds for people who want to protect their little kingdoms and would rather cut off their noses to spite their faces than back down in a room full of people.

Saying that, he wouldn't be here to fight those finance battles if it wasn't for the emergency care he received 12 years ago, and for that it is truly a wonderful service.

I work in a specialist child department and we are neither underfunded nor mismanagement of funds. What does drain our resources if the non attendees some weeks it is 40%.
I am almost in the camp of charging for DNA regardless of excuses of which I have heard of everything under the sun and I say that as a ft working lone parent with a dc with additional needs.
My exdh “forgot “ to take dc to a NHs dentist appointment the other day had I not texted to remind my dc and they arrived 10 minutes late that would have been lost clinical time.
It’s a huge problem as is the nonsense that some people attend GP. , out of hours and A&E with.

I used to work in private healthcare and there is no way it is a better system overall - the only reason it seems desirable by comparison to the NHS is that it has fewer patients/pressures.
It’s also, obviously, geared up to make money out of you and take advantage of health fears, I’ve known people insist on going private at the expense of getting seen sooner on the NHS and then not have their consultations covered by insurance precisely because they could have been seen sooner on the NHS - a policy that is pretty hard to explain to a hysterical woman who’s juts been told she needs further investigation. No thanks.

Cancer survival rates in the NHS are the worst around. People get diagnosed much too late compared to the other health systems. That's acknowledged as not a funding issue, it's behavioural, apparently.

Shame, as if it were a funding issue, some of the wasted millions could go to fixing cancer treatment.

The real problem is 'complex needs' ie the old person who can't move, can't function and has no working mind. But they're not terminally ill, so the costs for caring for them are jaw-dropping. A lot is social care, ie not paid by the NHS, but about 95 per cent of the NHS budget goes on the over-70s.

Lots of my family members work in the NHS. They say it is haemorrhaging money through wasteful spending. Procurement processes are crazy and suppliers are taking the mick with the costs because they know the NHS won’t ‘shop around’ e.g. on Amazon.

Also half of private healthcare communication is still conducted BY FAX. That should give you some indication of the level of communication management within the sector.

Cancer survival rates in the NHS are the worst around.

The worst around where? Can you provide a link? I had a quick Google and couldn't see anything that would justify saying that.

about 95 per cent of the NHS budget goes on the over-70s.

I found a Guardian article from 2016 stating that around 40% gets spent on over-65s, but nothing that corroborates your statistic.

It will take a miracle to sort it all out. Funds are spent in the wrong areas, staff aren’t treated well and good staff leave because of it. Agency staff are used to run wards with no regular staff on shift. Changes are made and staff are just expected to change too - there’s no thanks to those that do a great job. There's no thanks to the staff who work behind the scenes to make things happen. Admin staff are treated poorly, as are other support staff.
It depends on what treatment you’re receiving whether you have a good experience or not.
I work for the nhs and am proud of my small part I play in trying my best every day. Despite the cuts, changes and no thanks.
I don’t know what the answer is though.