AIBU to get a bit fucked off at having to protect the NHS?

[Santaclauswhosthat]

This is a healthcare system I've paid into all my life. I don't think everyone who works in it is a hero and the vast majority of them aren't underpaid. It's ranked 16th in the world and has the worst cancer outcomes for any developed country. It's not very good. Nonetheless it's the only healthcare system open to me right now. But I can't access it. My operation had been cancelled and I can't get a consultant appointment. The GPs aren't seeing patients face to face. I've already had one tumour removed that was on the turn. I'm worried that I may have another. I have no way of finding out if this is the case. A family member has already died of covid 19 after being denied treatment for three days during which repeated calls to the ambulance service were made whereupon his mother was told she should only ring again if his lips turned blue. He is dead. Right now. The NHS didn't protect him. It isn't protecting me either. What is the point of the NHS, exactly? Most clinics are closed or running at half mast. GPs aren't seeing anyone. NHS staff get shopping hours and free food and fuck knows what else and we are all dying protecting them.

At least 129 health and social care workers have died from covid so far, in just over a month.

Given that there have been 20,000 plus deaths - and there's more than 1.5 million people employed by the NHS, then this number is a lot lower than it was anticipated to be. NHS employs around 2% of the population, yet at the moment is only accounting for 0.6% of the deaths by my rough calculations. Obviously the bad thing is the shift in age from the people dying, but my medical friends were expecting to see the number be severely disproportionate to the general population by a good two/three percent increase.

Whilst I’m sorry for your loss, and it’s been awful- don’t just lash out and do the generalistic blame game.

Make a specific complaint about your father. And your own treatment.

Fight to restore the NHS. Most clinicians are excellent and care good. Many areas are not. Many parts of it are not. In many areas of cancer treatment it is world leading. Not all. And not all areas.

It’s very naive to pay a small amount of tax (proportional to the size of the countries spend and debts) and expect the services provided by the state to be good. Healthcare is very expensive, you can’t pay a token amount of tax and expect a world class service.

Fair points, OP - well put

Yanbu OP. Many people abuse the NHS, I would welcome a small charge for using GPs, ambulances and all visitors to the country should be required to have insurance. Missed appointments, drunken a&e visits etc. are not acceptable. It is a broken system.

I am sorry for your loss, routine treatments need to be resumed but politicians seem to think COVID is the only illness worth fighting atm.

NHS staff get shopping hours and free food and fuck knows what else and we are all dying protecting them. what a twatty thing to say. As a PP said; do you want to trade places with them?

YANBU, what are GP's doing for 9 hours a day if they have no appointments because we all have to stay at home. And nobody dare answer shite about video and telephone appointments.

YABNU. A friend of mine in Ireland had a radical mastectomy a couple of weeks before the shutdown there. She drives herself to her chemo sessions in a major hospital and home again. There was no question of putting her chemo off.

The cynic in me says the tunnel vision focus on covid in the UK is all about covering the arses of politicians who let the virus run amok while scoffing at countries taking it seriously. It's harder to count people who die at home.

packetandtripe GPs are seeing some urgent patients same as practice nurses. They have their day full of 5 minutes telephone consultations. Referrals, prescriptions, review bloods, imagining, act on it, safeguarding issues, etc etc.

@Pinkybutterfly, I don't mean it badly, but I did say telephone consultations - forget it - they are as worthwhile as googling shit yourself. Referrals can't be done without a physical examination - reviewing bloods can't be done without seeing a GP to get a bloodtest in the first place - 'imagining' - imaging? again you won't be referred for any type of scan without a physical consultation. Prescriptions - I mean pharmacies are repeating them anyway and a call to the surgery facilitates that in normal times. Safeguarding issues?? No what are they actually doing?

It’s not the NHS fault lots of their staff I know are just as frustrated sitting doing nothing as not on the covid19 wards.

But this whole cluster fuck stands firmly at the feet of every twat who voted Tory and every labour member who put an unelectable leader in place that means we’re all fucked.

We will all be able to watch the NHS being sold down the river by Boris, Hancock and Patel at the end of the year as part of a US trade deal.

Really sorry for you OP, but this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

My DS is in high risk category. He is fed through his jejunum and requires drainage on his tummy. This week I have had to argue with a GP for a liquid omeprazole to protect his stomach...which was bleeding.
Apparently the drug we require is too expensive....the cheaper drug will block his tube and then he will need to go into hospital and have it replaced in theatre with radiology!
Finally our paediatrician who had been allocated elsewhere in the system called..... found a suitable drug, prescribed it, took it to a pharmacy and then delivered it to my home.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying swings and roundabouts......those that really do need the care ....will and should be getting it. You just need go Express yourself clearly !!!!

@packetandtripe I know that the majority of your list is happening at our GP surgery. Referrals, and urgent referrals can be done without a physical examination in some cases - even in pre-covid days.

Most clinics are closed or running at half mast

I’ve never seen”half mast” used like this before.

The NHS was pretty shit under Labour too yeah they might have pumped more money into but not into patient care, they created endless tiers of management etc the NHS wastes vast amounts of money it does get and no-one is held accountable

While the NHS has its failings and most of those lay in the bureaucracy IMO, the fault lies with society as a whole.

Because while on the one hand the funding has often been lacking, on the other hand society object to the idea of having to pay more tax,more national insurance,and the progression of medicine means that expectation is greater than it was when the NHS was formed without the money to back it up...

So 40 years ago IVF, plastic surgery, were unheard of,and medical science wasn’t as far progressed in other conditions e.g. cardiac/oncology/other illnesses which were little known.

Now we expect to be treated for all those things without additional input from ourselves and the reality is that the NHS is not fit for purpose any more and needs re-structuring, but that will need to require sacrifices so that certain treatments e.g. IVF no longer be considered funded by a service which can’t cope with threats to existing life let alone creating new life.

YANBU. A lot of hero worshipping happening for people who are just that - people doing a job. I've always found the obsession with the NHS a bit weird, we aren't allowed to say a bad word, even though the service we get is relatively quite poor.

I do love the NHS, and think it does a good job in a lot of circumstances. But at the end of the day it is just an organisation which has the same issues and ranges of competence that all organisations have. I do find the constant fawning over it a bit much. It’s kind of the same as efforts to support other professions at times when they are on the front line of a crisis, but the difference with the NHS appears to be it is immune from criticism and if you do so you are a terrible person.

Sorry for your loss OP

It's not unreasonable in my view to think that it's odd we are told to protect the healthcare system, when it is there to protect us. I don't mean that because we should be abusing it, but that along with the religious like cult around the NHS is to make people feel like a burden, and like if they access it at the moment they aren't protecting it; which makes the job of keeping it from folding a bit easier because people are dying at home. The NHS is broken, but no one will do anything substantial to overhaul it because obviously then you want to sell it to trump and hate poor people. That said, the vast majority of healthcare workers are doing an amazing job despite the state it is in (some are shit, just like any other profession), and I bet most are heartbroken for the patients that they cannot treat at the moment. The dancing was insensitive to post on social media, but you can't criticise that without hating nurses. Speaking of which, the emotive language around nurses such as angels at the moment is purposeful, to make people feel like loss is inevitable on the 'frontline', as they are soldiers who have volunteered to put themselves at risk for the public- rather than the government having to acknowledge that lack of PPE is likely to play a part in the loss of some. Basically, it's them being shat on under the guise of something positive, so I wouldn't throw hate that way, the shopping hour is just a bit of good PR for supermarkets. It is a bit weird though as some friends have started shopping to save their partners (non NHS) queuing, which surely presents more risk to people? Anyway, yes there are a lot of issues, no it's not the fault of most of those working, and it's all justified by the public as a whole reveering it and being made to feel grateful that we have it.

I have always been amazed at the amount of people in the recent past shutting down all criticism of the NHS, boasting how great it was, that we were so lucky, how it was the best in the world and so on.
Whilst frankly the NHS has been shit for year. I am not blaming the staff, but the lack of resources, the infrastructure, the medieval concept of "communal wards:, the post code lottery, the months of wait for urgent treatments, the dismissal of non-life threatening issue, and the moronic "but it's free".

Yes, the NHS could have been worst, but no one has ever seemed to consider it should be modern and treat patients like priorities and not like annoying cattle.

I hope this will be a wake-up call and we start at least admitting we need a modern and human system. It might takes years, decades even to get it rid, but not accepting an unacceptable system would be a start.

I don't mean the empty promises from labour to magic funding out of thin air to shower hospitals with them, without any actual plan or vision...

I can agree with you up to a point OP, but if I had to rely on my little bit of tax (& I don’t care how much you earn) to pay for my treatment I’d’ve been fucked years ago. A specialist nurse told me that I was costing the NHS a fortune, maybe, but I was keeping that vile cunt in a job. Don’t get me wrong I’ve been treated by the best of the best & for that I’ll always be grateful. It also depends what cancer you have too to how they treat you. If you get breast cancer everyone’s all over you like you wouldn’t believe, but when you get a Cinderella cancer you then realize how unimportant you are. But in saying all of that it’s very much the same all over, everyone’s had their treatment or an op cancelled until further notice & they don’t know when that will be. We can’t just blame NHS, at least they’re trying to do something about it which is more than can be said for Johnson et al who’ve lost control. Then there’s the people who are carrying on like nothing’s happening when people are dying all around them. Right now cancer’s the last thing on my mind OP & it has to come second to Covid.

I think the Govt is using us, the public, praising the NHS to distract from the fact that they have run it down to the bone in the last 10 years.

This. Except most people still don't get it. All the sugary saccharine stuff like clapping merely makes the government feel like they've done a great job with such little resources [Confused]

@MrsKypp

The NHS needs complete reform and we need to learn from successful countries how to go about it.

Completely correct. I have observed this for years. Healthcare will continue sucking up greater amounts of money so unless the economy grows, the amount it needs as a proportion of National income keeps growing.

Hospitals are empty...well A&E..yes definitely people have stopped going who didn't need to but looking at the vast number of non Covid deaths that have rocketed, people suffering from suspected strokes, heart attacks etc are no longer going, and well....dying from it

Plus, the NHS have stopped treating some people. Know of someone with a child, stage 4 cancer. With treatment, pos 5 years, without 1 year life expectancy. She isn't being treated as she should be due to CV

Unfortunately we are moving into the cure is becoming far worse than the disease and the publication of the Office for National Statistics stats which are far better than the daily figures are now showing the shocking implications of this strategy..and yes dealing with all CV patients at Nightingale hospitals is a must. How will,this be afforded when the economy is broken

In 5 years there will be studies showing the true extent of those deaths cause as a result of CV, and not due to

Unfortunately, whilst I feel for the staff and the amazing demands they are suffering, this will elevate the NHS into even higher saintly status and even more difficult to reform.

Lock down has been implemented in lots of countries not just the UK. Clearly in these other countries it's not about protecting the NHS. It's just in the UK using the slogan 'protect the NHS' makes people listen and comply with lockdown. Lock down is so much more, it's making sure that not too many people get ill at one time (I don't mean life threateningly ill but too sick to work) so that supply chains to supermarkets stay in tact. That there are enough well police to keep order. That there are enough well people to keep water, gas and electric services going. That there are enough care workers to support the elderly and disabled in care homes or their own homes. There is obviously also the aim to reduce impact on health services but it's certainly not the only reason for lockdown.

So I can understand given your situation that your really upset but the 'protect the NHS' is merely a slogan to get us all to comply with current restrictions. It's certainly not a reason to start bashing the NHS.

The NHS is a holy cow in the UK and the government of the day often invoke it as a smoke screen. It isn't that great and most European countries have better free at the point of use healthcare paid for by deductions from salary, or the government where people aren't earning. From an end user point of view it's pretty similar to the NHS except that the deductions are more, and ring fenced, and the healthcare is better with shorter waiting times.

That isn't health care workers' fault obviously.

We do have lockdown in most countries but in the part of Germany I live in GPs and dentists are still seeing patients.