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?

We could have a better system, but we're going to have to put an awful lot more in to get it.

And manage peoples expectations of staff. You and many others on the thread have shared stories of seeing a GP straight away, no wait for specialisms, choosing when and where tou see certain doctors. This can only be achieved with significantly more staff with more slack in the system. You cant expect same day appointments at a time convenient to you (as opposed to sit and wait for hours like many GPS do) and also complain when you see staff not up to much.

"I always think people who slate the NHS are the ones who have never been very very ill. When you are near death's door, you see a different side to it - one that is truly amazing"

The only time I have been very ill has been down to mistakes made by the NHS.

I wonder what the difference would be in the additional tax needed to be paid by an individual to fund the NHS better and the amount it would cost to the individual and their dependents , if the entire country moved to an insurance type system ?
This is one of the problems when discussing this subject , there are very few concrete figures about. If you have to pay more tax for a better funded/better service NHS , how much would that be in reality ? If the country moved to a insurance type system , not the USA model but more in keeping with other European countries, what would that cost the individual each month , how much would be paid out of taxes , how much by companies if the individual is employed ?

Is there anyone on here who is currently living in Europe who is paying for healthcare as a citizen of that country ? How much does it cost ?

Also what do you have to pay for ? so GP, dentistry , prescriptions and how much do these cost or are any included ?

People need to read Peter Duffy's book, Whistle in the Wind. It's a very fair summary of problems in the NHS. Yes, fund shortages. But also some very underhand actions by consultants etc who artificially keep patients on their books for repeat referrals every few months so that the waiting lists are kept large which triggers extra sessions to help reduce the waiting list, earning the consultant £500 extra per session. Also, repeated mistakes and other issues by doctors etc due to incompetence and laziness which leaves others to pick up the next day. Labour trebled the spending on the NHS. You could double it next year, but all wasted unless someone actually tackles the core inefficiencies, waste and yes, fraud!

Is it all free for children for instance or those on low or no income ?

How much additional tax would people have to pay to double funding to the NHS Kazzyhoward ? Did people pay three times more tax and NI under Labour when they trebled the spending on it ( for how many years ?) Was this back when Blair was PM ?
You are quite right though, there are areas where it could be more efficient, waste could be reduced and obviously fraud should be addressed.

Yes because private is the answer isnt it? So people who cant afford private healthcare should put up with being treated like shit, neglected and made even sicker? Are you fucking mad?!

Yes private is the answer.

The NHS won’t treat Dp even though he pays in from his salary every month.

We have ended up paying for treatment after the NHS took so long to diagnose him. He was so ill that they gave him only 48 hours to live.
They don’t believe he is worth treating so don’t treat him

Oliversmumsarmy so sorry to hear your DH is living with a terminal diagnosis, that must be horrendous for you all

I think the person writing about managing people’s expectations of the NHS works in it, but has never experienced it in real life. And if they have experienced then they’ve had special treatment because they are known to staff.

Sometimes you do need seen that day - that’s how illness works. But I’ve had plenty of mismanagement of more minor illness - wound infections - that I’ve had to keep going back about / or argue with NHS24 that I need seen ASAP because a wound is showing signs of tracking. I’ve had to argue with NHS 24 to get seen for what I know is shingles - on Christmas Day - who goes to hospital on Christmas unless they need to?

There is something far wrong with the NHS - I feel there’s a predisposition from hospital staff to see all patients as time wasters. You tend to get different Drs every time -so there’s no continuity. They’re all following algorithms on their phones - so there’s no thinking.

I think GPs are still pretty good - but they are under so much pressure they won’t last long either

@Frumpety, most relevent experience that I can quote is that of DMIL, who travelled to southern France to stay two nights with her brother before taking a train to SE France to visit us (she was then 76). When she arrived with us, she asked to sleep as tired, then wanted to see a medic (she was a nurse). We found an elderly person's home, and they gave her an ECG, and with the result, called the paramedics, who blue-lighted her to the local university teaching hospital with DH clinging on in the hire car because he had no idea where to go. After she was admitted, DH (whose French is rudimentary) thought she was there for observation. Came back, we slept. Come morning, I phoned to enquire if DMIL had slept. Au contraire, the operation went well, she had had stents overnight and would be ready to visit from midday. We went, she was in a pleasant two bed room with a view of the hills, being asked what she would like to eat. After three days, they allowed a discharge reluctantly, and I took her home by train, after getting her month-long prescription filled at the cost of 160 euros. The first thing her UK doc did was to change her prescription for generic NHS (cheap) medications. For all of which she was charged.... nothing. We were refunded the drug charge by insurance.

The NHS and its staff saved the life of my child. Twice. It needs an overhaul, it needs to be better funded, but I absolutely do thank my lucky stars for it.

kazzyhoward, that definitely happens in the private sector, certainly here in Australia. There is little incentive for drs to discharge patients when they can see them often and charge.
Years ago my Dh was training junior drs here and one of the questions he objected to most in the exams was how the patient would be treated - the ‘correct’ answer was to say you’d see them in your clinic every week/month/couple of months rather than looking to cure them.
He now works in both the public and private sectors and is dismayed to see how many of his colleagues patients bounce back and forth in and out of the private hospital, their Medicare cards and private insurance cards swiped each time, many of them really don’t need to be in hospital at all. The abuse of the system is awful.

frumpety

We are fine if he goes in with his diabetes or an infection.
(He had his spleen removed because the cancer had spread) but we are in the position of having to pay for anything to do with his cancer because the NHS doesn’t think he is worth treating.

So for us the NHS is a healthcare system that Dp pays for through his salary but we have to pay privately for any cancer operations.

It is worse than the American system

When you are near death's door, you see a different side to it - one that is truly amazing

DH went to the GP 2 years ago, saying he thought he had a heart problem! She laughed (considering his father had his 1st heart attack at 49) and only referred him for tests after he went back to say he was dying. She didn’t laugh when he told her the invasive angiogram showed a 90% blockage in a coronary artery and they put a stent in!

September, he went back with breathlessness and left arm pain. The GP said he could have a heart attack at any time; and she wanted him seen within 2 weeks. It took 7 weeks after 5 phone calls by him (and they told him a different story every time to explain why he hadn’t had an appointment) for him to be seen. The angiogram showed 90% blockage in another coronary artery and they consider that to be a heart attack!

So he has paid £40,000 pa in tax for the last 30 years and after 2 heart attacks already per the hospital, he had to wait 3 months for another stent, knowing he could have a fatal heart attack at any time!

XingMing so she had treatment in France under the reciprocal agreement between EU countries ? And also had travel insurance or do you mean you claimed against your own health insurance as you were living in France ?

When you are near death's door, you see a different side to it - one that is truly amazing

Nope, didn't see that at all with our nearest and dearest. What we saw was my FIL as a fit and healthy 60 year old admitted via A&E and just languishing on a surgical ward for a few weeks whilst they farted around trying to diagnose why he couldn't pass urine and threw up anything he ate. As the weeks passed, he got weaker and weaker, ending up a shadow of his former self. A succession of doctors came and went day by day, they'd order x-rays and scans and blood tests, the same having been done previously. Each time a new face appeared, they just ordered the same tests, seldom bothered to look at the file or previous tests. Some put him on IV drips, the next day he was taken off by a different doctor. Then he had nutritional injections into his stomach for a couple of days, then a different doctor stopped them. Every new face was like starting afresh, no continuity, no sign of them even looking at the notes/tests undertaken by a previous doctor. The crunch came when he developed pneumonia - we were told to expect the worse and they he probably wouldn't make it through the night (Saturday). OH and MIL kicked up a right fight with the ward sister and insisted on the consultant being called out given that he had gone in a few weeks prior fit and healthy and that he'd deteriorated under their eyes. The sister was actually one of the best they'd come across, listened and understood what they were saying, and in the middle of the night (early Sunday morning), a consultant appeared, someone they'd not seen before, he looked through the notes and immediately had FIL transferred to intensive care and then operated the next morning (Sunday morning) on what turned out to be a simple bowel blockage. FIL made a very quick recovery and was discharged within a week.

Having read Consultant Peter Duffy's whistle blowing book, we now understand what happened - the doctors were just passing him off each day, ordering a few tests to make it look that they were doing something, all in the hope it would be someone else who'd diagnose and have to operate.

So, no, I don't think it was "truly amazing" that the hospital let a healthy man almost die before someone who wasn't lazy/incompetent could be found to diagnose and operate!

What Kazzyhoward’s fil went through sums up exactly what is wrong with the NHS

Instead of looking at a patient and looking for a cure they leave the patient in a precious hospital bed hoping they will die before having to do any costly treatment.

Yet it would have been cheaper to actually look at the test results, make a diagnosis and get him operated on within the day than keep ordering the same test results and having him hang around bed blocking and taking up everyone’s time.

I think Kazzyhoward age plays a great part in whether you actually get treated.

I know that there will be posters who will come on and say their grandma 83 got really good treatment but in my experience those are the rarity and not the norm.

I wonder how many people actually would be clogging up the wards if the pressure was on actually curing people and getting them recovered and out rather than this torture they put people through of fiddling around wasting money ordering tests because they believe it to be cheaper or just keeping someone in a hospital bed till they get so ill they die

There was a tragic thread on here recently involving a posters fil that should have been a simple operation and he would have been out but they left him to deteriorate to the point where they couldn’t operate.

The problem seems to be that in order to save money the NHS and those who work for it have this false economy of operations cost money, treatment costs money, so don’t operate or treat until you have to.

In the meantime patients are costing more sitting in a bed and being fed and being fiddled around with, sent for the same tests over because they are cheap and in the end either get the operation or die. Which ends up costing more

Or gps treating one symptom at a time rather than looking at the whole list and diagnosing from there.

That is what needs fixing first before any more money is pumped into the NHS

The current health and social care system is on its knees due to an aging population and medical advances keeping people alive - it's quite simply a victim of its own success ...
As a society we need to move towards preventative measures and focus on staying as healthy as we possibly can for as long as we can ..Simple things like regular exercise cuts the falls massively in the elderly population...type two diabetes is on the increase and it's not only the primary condition that costs the nhs it's the associated cardiac and kidney problems etc The list is endless.....
Unless we stop expecting the nhs to pick up the pieces of our lifestyle choices then it wont be here for future generations.....

The current health and social care system is on its knees due to an aging population and medical advances keeping people alive - it's quite simply a victim of its own success

How far back do you want to go?

As a family we have had shot service from the NHS dating back to the 60s and it hadn’t got anything to do with money.

Listening costs nothing.

And if the NHS is on its knees because of money why is it so wasteful

The current health and social care system is on its knees due to an aging population and medical advances keeping people alive - it's quite simply a victim of its own success

No, it’s on its knees because of deliberate underfunding by the Tories, whose ideology is to shrink the welfare state. Had a Sovereign Fund been established with the NI contributions from the 1940s, and later North Sea oil revenues, I doubt we would be in quite the same mess? The state pension always has been a Ponzi scheme in this country!

This is interesting and maybe we could learn from Germany:

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/research/what-can-england-learn-from-the-long-term-care-system-in-germany

Can I just reiterate that I do not believe that the NHS is perfect and I despair at poor treatment or lack of treatment as much as the next person.

YANBU, I agree with you. It can be very shit.