to think that the NHS is really quite shit and that not everyone who works in it is an underpaid hero?

[Adenosine]

There is a strange British preoccupation with the NHS which I think prevents honest public dialogue about its many shortcomings. At the time it was set up it was innovative, but now there are many other universal healthcare systems most of which are better than the NHS and many of which cost less money.

It's ranked low globally and really quite shit yet few people dare criticise or. AIBU to think that we really need to be far more critical?

The NHS has its faults but when the shit has hit the fan we (my family) have been able to access health care for free which has at times saved our lives. It’s an amazing part of our society.

I prefer the systems in France, Germany & Canada. Yes there are small co-pays and those who can must pay an affordable charge for insurance, but the care is not nearly as underfunded as the nhs

The NHS is incredible. I don’t think anyone is under any illusions about it’s shortcomings, but everybody knows they’re not insurmountable issues. They’re not flaws inherent to this healthcare system, they’re flaws caused by people who are running it and are afraid to make proper changes to the structure and to streamline the services. Case in point, unnecessary staffing crisis.

alternative private systems don’t bear thinking about.

Go visit a 3rd world country for a few weeks and then ask yourself the same question again.

A few months ago, I accompanied a friend of mine to A&E and she was seen by a Dr who was from Spain. She was very knowledgable and efficient. I was very impressed by her. Upon leaving, I did offer gratitude and she was ever so appreciative.

It was a really busy night so I can only imagine what she’d seen and handled on her shift.

Yes we ‘all pay tax’ blah blah, but we receive more out of the system than what we put in. Regardless of whether we ‘scrounge’ or not.

The NHS is a wonderful concept and it's great that it was designed for the poorest in mind. It needs restructuring and more money, not just a load of cash chucked at it yet again without any thought for the public's complex needs.

We don't need to privatise it or change it to some other system we just need to consider the needs of the UK public and fix it. It [structure] was originally devised by a cross part group, we should select a cross party group to restructure it.

Anyone needing to understand why it’s all getting worse could do worse than start by looking closer to home-
Too much drinking- a&e and ambulance impact is horrendous
Too much entitlement to very cheap OTC drugs (yes calpol paracetamol ibruprofen etc you can afford the 24p- 1.50 for unbranded versions)

Too much using ambulances as taxis
Too little use of pharmacists and surgery nurses rather than doctors- the volume of people in a&e en mass as a family for a trivial issue is truly shocking

Australian system is free and far superior- time for scans and assessment much shorter. Road tax/car tax pays towards health care of anyone involved in a traffic accident. I would much rather be sick there than the UK.

Yes we ‘all pay tax’ blah blah, but we receive more out of the system than what we put in. Regardless of whether we ‘scrounge’ or not

Wait till you are older and get something wrong with you.

Left up to the NHS Dp would have been dead by now.

They refused him an operation that would buy him more time.

We paid (if you don’t have a spare £100k knocking about then your dead)

In the meantime Dp is back at work paying into a healthcare system that won’t treat him.

I think that once you get to a certain age the NHS seem to wash their hands of you

It is almost like they have got you to 60/70 and their work is done.

Yes we ‘all pay tax’ blah blah, but we receive more out of the system than what we put in.

This really isn't how taxes work.

Would you prefer a private system like America? Where pregnant women are treated like slabs of meat instead of living, feeling beings?

What a ridiculously sweeping, ill informed statement @Littlemeadow123! I've given birth three times in the US and each time I was treated wonderfully in terrific (county) facilities.

Go visit a 3rd world country for a few weeks and then ask yourself the same question again.

That’s totally irrelevant. We don’t live in a third world country. We should be benchmarking ourselves against countries with comparable GDP.

I had cancer. My treatment and after care was excellent. I can't fault it. I also had counselling on the NHS to help with my cancer induced anxiety. I'm on a forum for my particular type of cancer and most people on this forum live in the US. It blows my mind how they are often refused treatment and scans because their insurance companies refuse to pay. I see people going bankrupt in the richest country in the world! Imagine this kind of stress when you're already dealing with cancer. I think some people in the UK take the NHS completely for granted because they have no idea how bad it is in other countries. When I was diagnosed with cancer in my 30s with two toddlers to look after I was so thankful to receive such attentive and efficient care for free.

It needs radical over haul. Pay the best people from business to come in and change it.

The NHS is overhauled every time there’s a change of government and every time it is, it costs more money. The never ending rebranding also costs a fortune.
There are already masses of people from business backgrounds working within it - they’re the managers and CEOs.
When I was working in the NHS we had supermarket managers coming in trying to show us how things should be run. Having since worked in both environments I can say with confidence that the way supermarkets are run make the NHS look like a slick well oiled machine, and that’s not mentioning the hygiene and food safety practices, which look good in theory but are rarely adhered to because profit is the only aim. It’s made me very wary of buying anything which isn’t wrapped or doesn’t need cooking!!
The NHS needs people who understand best practice for their own services to run them within their budgets. My DH was asked at an interview how he could make 35% savings to the service he was applying to. He had a look, said it wouldn’t be problem and did it while keeping the service to patients consistent. The problem came the following year and the following one when he was asked to do the same. There is only so much you can cut before it starts affecting those who are accessing a depleting service.

I’m on a forum for my particular type of cancer and most people on this forum live in the US. It blows my mind how they are often refused treatment and scans because their insurance companies refuse to pay

Maybe because of your age you got treated by the NHS but Dp (60) was not treated at all. Save for a saline bag or 8 we had to pay for every bit of treatment

Dp has American health insurance and if he had been well enough to get on a plane it would have cost us nothing.
As it happened we did have a spare £100k so were able to pay otherwise this wonderful NHS he pays into and has paid into for the last 42 years each and every month refused to pay out when he needed it.

I think that once you get to a certain age the NHS seem to wash their hands of you

I don't think that's necessarily true though.

Fil has cancer. He is in his 70s. He's receiving excellent treatment, including some experimental drugs which we know are very expensive. Regular appointments, sees great doctors and consultants. Had]s has no,issues.

My mum is mid 60s. Taken to a and e yesterday by ambulance, as called 111 in pain. Had tests and ultrasounds yesterday and is having an operation today. All treated with care and respect at the hospital yesterday.

My grandma is 91 and she's just had superb care being taken and the treated in hospital for a suspected 'mild' heart attack.

When I went for my heart procedure I was sat next to a lady in her mid 90s. She was in for a different op, but was saying how lovely she had been cared for and how quick her surgery had come through.

As said before, maybe my experience has been lucky but I've always had great service and treatment.

Unfortunately that hasn’t been our experience

As a nurse I can see both sides to this argument. The services are overstretched with more demand than there are people and resources to help them. I think the NHS does the best it can but it's not always good enough.
I, as do many of my co workers have private health insurance. It eats up a huge part of my salary but when I see the waiting times and limitations on NHS treatment I feel it's a cost worth paying.
Every day I go into work and give 100% and I know the NHS will give that back to me if needed, just sometimes they can't do it in the time frame required.

Private health care would be ok for minor surgery, but I would never have anything major done in a private hospital. The infrastructure isn't there if the shit hits the fan. Just think about out of hours and the number of doctors and other staff on site, plus the broad range of diagnostic services, and consultants from every specialty available on call in the NHS. If a member of my family had an arrest, I'd want an anaesthetist to be there - there will be multiple anaesthetists resident overnight in a large NHS hospital, probably none in the private sector.

The nhs needs to change as the needs of the people it serves change. I would like to see a national plan on what it will fund and not fund not a postcode lottery as it is now. I would like to see the separate trust working together rather as one example is my brother has received treatment in one hospital trust. Think major 10 hour life saving surgery then after a problem on discharge he needed an up to date mri which could have been done at his local hospital 2 miles away but instead a very sick man had to be transported 2 hours away to the original hospital and then transported back there again a few days later for the results.
If the different trusts had a way to work together he would have had his mri locally, the images digitally transferred to the other hospital and the. Only one need to move him 2 hours away. If this is going on a national scale think of the money that is being wasted.
People also need to take more responsibility. Anyone who has ever been to a&e on a Friday or Saturday night knows it is full of drunks with problems that could have been avoided if they hadn’t got pissed.
Another example happened just this Friday. My adult son tries to get a doctors appt as the winter weather is making his eczema flare up. No appointments available for 2 weeks by which time his eczema will most probably be 100 times worse and possibly infected as well. Yet up on the wall is a notice that 98 appointments have been missed this month.

I don’t have all the answers but throwing money at it won’t work on its own and I would support any party who was willing to take on the task.

I would be happy to pay more tax if it meant more funding going to the NHS. But until it stops haemorrhaging money through utter pointless waste then I never will.

I used to work for a company who went out to fix machines in hospitals. Whoever was responsible could have ordered the consumables and fit them themselves but wouldn’t because it was easier to pay someone £200 a day than order the £20 part needed... that was one tiny tiny process.

The same with someone I know who fit ramps. It’s like they plucked a business name from a hat and paid them whatever they wanted without even looking into costs.

Whilst I have received some good care, I have also received wrong results, appalling attitudes, backward and forward pointless referrals within the system, massive admin errors.

It needs radical over haul

It is being continually overhauled and that's where the money is going. I've worked in the NHS for 38 years and its been in a constant state of change in that time. The changes are getting faster now and one new system doesn't have time to even get going, before its changed again. Each new manager that arrives changes as much as they can. We call it 'Empire Building' where I work.

Just leave it the fuck alone for a set period of time - say 6 years - and let it settle properly.

This thread had really shown the poor understanding the public have of the NHS, sadly.

Talking about needless prescription of over the counter medicine, ambulance transport, drunken A&E attendance, even travel health, all these are just a tiny drop in the ocean of the NHS costs.

I'll see it again, the cost that is seriously debilitating the NHS is diabetes. Preventable diabetes, but this is just ignored because recognising this fact is pointing the finger our ourselves, and no-one wants to do that.

The care for diabetes become an issue later in age, so the majority of posters here don't see any of it. They talk about the NHS from their experience, except that the experience of 20-50yo is not even 1/3rd of the cost of the NHS.

It's older age that is the draining the NHS, a vast majority a necessity, but again, it's the impact of diabetes that takes a toll in older age that is the biggest drain, so stop pointing the fingers at the system, at stuff that do need improvement but are only a needle in a stack of hay or starting question what YOU can do to improve your lifestyle so that we don't become the generation that will definitely finish off the NHS in 20 years time.

Dp has been in and out of hospital over the last few years and one thing we have noticed that would probably save million is the making up of beds on the day someone is discharged.

Patient gets told they are going home that day.

Nurses come in and strip the bed and make it up with clean sheets.

Patient then sits on the bed waiting for the doctor to come round.

Doctor then discharges the patient.

Patient leaves

Nurses come to strip the bed and make it up again

Total madness

We asked why and was told that I’d hoe it has always been done.

Nursing almost 30 years I strongly disagree the NHS washes its hands of you come 70. Quite the reverse. The over 65's are the biggest users of and cost to the NHS. Understandably so. But I also believe many people are living too long modern medicine pushed by families expectations often prolongs life at all costs. We can't cure everything, nor should we want to.
Dementia is the ticking time bomb.