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 needs a shit ton of money pumped into it but no one wants to pay for it.

Overall I agree and I work as frontline nhs staff (bank only now).

Emergency treatment, etc is always amazing ime, the proper life and death stuff.

The more chronic stuff, less so. Usually due to lack of staff. Here if you need a neurology appt the waiting list is eleven months. Dd has chronic health issues and when she has a symptom change and needs to see her consultant it’s a 5 month minimum wait to see him.....and all the time she’s in pain, etc. Then he will order tests and after that it’s another wait of months and months to be seen to discuss the test results.

It needs a shit ton of money pumped into it but no one wants to pay for it

They do, the Tories just choose not to.

To be honest I find it amazing that we have always got access to what we need when we need it

But that's the problem. We don't. The cancer survival stats highlighted only last week show otherwise. We're bad at timely referrals and diagnosis, and not just for cancer. And it's not just a question of comparing NHS with private. Across Europe we compare badly in this respect against a range of models. I want the NHS put right, but access to the right services at the right time is a very big problem.

Saved my life when I haemorrhaged after giving birth to my daughter - so no. Not shit.

I think a lot of it depends on where you are and how the hospital is run. The trust I work for (not in London) was recently rated outstanding on our cqc. I am happy working at this trust and although sometimes its horribly busy, majority of the time I feel happy with the level of care we give our patients and I dont feel like I'm being stretched too thin. But I know theres other hospitals around that are appalling... imo the issue is due to both underfunding and poor managing in badly performing trusts. It's not just underfunding that is the problem (but it is a very big part of the problem).

I think the Brits rate the fact that the NHS is free above anything else. There are plenty of European health systems much better than the British. The alternative is not the US-way.

Agree with the poster below, at least we have the option.

I've used the walk in and the a and e several times and yes there's been a wait but better than not having the option.

Saved my life when I haemorrhaged after giving birth to my daughter - so no. Not shit.

Saved my life twice in dire emergencies too, so no not shit (haven't seen anyone saying that either). Are there problems though? Big ones, particularly with less urgent care? Yes.

@Cheeserton that’s why I said there are issues. A friend of mine was diagnosed with aggressive cancer a month ago two weeks later she started treatment. I agree the NHS are removing drugs/treatments that save lives. As I said the % of people paying in compared to the % using it I’m surprised it’s still going

Of course you may get better treatment options if you pay private

Depending on the treatment you may be sent to a nhs hospital anyway.

A part of my treatment this year included the private side. Never, ever again.

@ffswhatnext again that’s why I said “May” get better treatments that the NHS won’t fund

I agree with the OP. I work for the NHS & despair - underfunding, low wages, poor morale, a focus on box ticking & budgets. Commissioned services are constantly being cut in my area with the result that vulnerable & elderly people have to suffer treatable medical conditions.

Like a PP my mum has cancer. In my opinion she has had, and continues to have a lot of mediocre & downright poor care. She was a nurse her whole working life & worked hard and advocated for her patients, so it seems particularly hard to me that the organisation she devoted so much of her life to has treated her with such disregard.

Ultimately I believe we have the health service we deserve as a society - my mums generation were proud of the NHS, my Grans generation were amazed, nowadays it seems a lot of people vote for the politicians and parties that promote self interest & value only money & personal possessions, rather than those committed to increasing taxes to fund a more caring and equitable society.

Theres a very big problem on preventive care and with GPs brushing off concerns rather then checking things out properly. Any child rash is dismissed as eczema without so much as a proper look, everything is sorted by painkillers or ADs... once u get a diagnosis its ok, but by the time you get that is often very very late and much more serious then it could have been. And no one envies the NHS what a stupid thing to say. Unless pp is referring to 3rd world country in a war with no healthcare at all. Everywhere you can have tests and things to check out symptoms before the doctor has something to say about it

that’s why I said there are issues
Fair enough, but I reacted to your statement that we get what we need when we need it, which often isn't so. I agree that the strain on resources is clearly unacceptable. I'm glad that your friend was dealt with rapidly too, and I'm also aware of such cases. I'm also aware of some terrible examples of things that have taken way too long to take seriously and get sorted. Like many people I suspect, I've seen and also been on the receiving end of some great treatment, but also some bad treatment.

Ultimately I believe we have the health service we deserve as a society - my mums generation were proud of the NHS, my Grans generation were amazed, nowadays it seems a lot of people vote for the politicians and parties that promote self interest & value only money & personal possessions, rather than those committed to increasing taxes to fund a more caring and equitable society.

Agree with this.

Saying your Gran was amazed made me remember something, my Gran talking about putting money by to pay for giving birth.

That brings it home for me a bit.

Of course it's falling apart and I don't think people are denying it but I do think they're denying the fact that some sort of Canada or Australia style private public hybrid is coming. Do you honestly think you'll be able to get 100% free at POS healthcare in the future? I don't think so and no other country has managed it. They all have some sort of insurance to support the public side. I would happily pay a reasonable monthly premium so the NHS can run properly and so that children elderly and disabled get care too.

@cheeserton I guess that sums the NHS up properly. It’s hit & miss. You can receive great care or non at all. I hope it can recover because if it collapsed one day under the strain so many people who can’t afford care will not get any. On the other hand I know there is a scheme of some sort running now where you can pay more to get fast tracked. Don’t take my word for it but it’s something like that

I guess that sums the NHS up properly. It’s hit & miss

I'm glad we can agree. That's exactly my experience.

YANBU

They discharged my dad at 4.00 am as they needed his bed. Woke him up to do it. Then stuck him in a regular taxi home. He had Parkinson's and dementia. They never bothered to inform my mum. The first she knew was at 6.00 am when her local postie knocked on the door having found my dad confused and wandering around the village in the cold.

And then there's this : NHS managers in U2 name fraud ordered to repay more than £500,000 www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-49760891

I suspect that the emphasis on saving money leads to extra expenditure, oddly enough.

I had a really nasty and quite honestly debilitating skin condition on my hands a few years ago. My GP started me on the lowest possible dose of steroids. Every so often, as my skin worsened, I would go back and she would up the dose to a slightly stronger version. She recommended also that I 'wash' my hands with moisturizing cream, not soap. As a result, the skin became infected as well. Eventually, the affected patch had spread from two fingers on one hand to the whole of both hands and I couldn't bend a finger without the skin cracking and bleeding.

Finally, I had had enough and scraped up the money to see a private dermatologist. She prescribed the strongest steroid available, and within week the problem had disappeared. If my GP had done that from the first, it would have been infinitely cheaper for the NHS, and saved me months of pain and debilitation. But I suspect that 'to save money' GPs are obliged to order the cheapest possible medication or test first, and gradually move up the scale, in the hope of avoiding the most expensive remedies.

A friend of mine has been incapacitated with back pain recently, ultimately becoming so bad that she could feel nothing below the waist and became incontinent.

Her GP sent her to A&E with a letter saying she needed an urgent MRI. She didn't get one. She had to wait over a week, and was moved around between three hospitals, each one performing cheaper and what seemed to her largely irrelevant tests, before the MRI was finally done. In the meantime she was drugged up to the eyeballs and eventually an inpatient.

The MRI found nothing of note in relation to her spine , and she was discharged. However, the report did mention a mass on one of her ovaries, which had not been further investigated by that team. She was advised to go back to her GP, who of course is now trying to restart the process so that this mass can be looked into. My friend's fear is that it is ovarian cancer - it would explain her symptoms.

Why the heck didn't they just look into it when she was in the MRI tube, and pass her over to a gynaecologist? Presumably because 'rules' prevented it, and the othopaedic team was protective of its budget. But the upshot, as well as extra pain and anxiety for my friend, is extra money spent by the NHS, surely ?

I guess that sums the NHS up properly. It’s hit & miss

But ‘hit and miss’ just isn’t good enough for a health service - people’s lives and wellbeing very much depend on it.

Admin don't always pass on patient messages. A while back I moved house. My GP moved a procedure to a local hospital. I called old hospital (weeks before the appointment) to let them know. Received a "you didn't attend" letter. Similar happened another time. I called to let them know I couldn't make it. No-one passed my message on.

I've twice missed appointments because the appointment letters were sent to the wrong address. The first time, they'd added a zero to my single-digit house number so it went to the wrong house, the second time it was a completely wrong address in a town 10 miles away.

The second time, they'd actually discharged me and I only found out when I happened to mention to my GP that I'd been waiting 9 months for an outpatient appointment.

I've also tried to cancel or rearrange appointments when unforeseen circumstances (a puncture in one case, 4-hour queue due to a major accident in the other) prevent attendance. One both occasions, I couldn't get through to the clinic in question. On one occasion, I did manage to get through to the appointments office, who told me that they couldn't let the clinic know it was cancelled.

Generally though, the NHS is awesome and no-one who is eligible for NHS treatment need ever go bankrupt because of medical bills (which were, and may still be, the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the US).

Isn't the cost of health tourism around 250m but the cost of fraud around 1.2b?