To rant because this NHS is not a charity

[Monty27]

Wtf is all this about having to donate to a service that is national.
The clue is in the name:
NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE
and breathe 😭

What the bloody hell are you on about... Can't make head nor tail of your post. Are you suggesting it's wrong for people to donate ipads?

@Bunnyfullerunny yes - what you said.

It is a very sad day for the NHS when their communities are having to sew their PPE while the government continue to pretend they are in control and there is no shortage. While the government pretend their lack of planning hasn't cost health workers their lives. Shame on them.

Yes charity is good, but it shouldn't be increasingly how we fund the NHS.

The donations are for NHS Charities.
When reports state NHS, they mean NHS Charities.
We need NHS Charities in the UK because nobody wants to pay enough tax.
Countries where people do pay their tax and tax rates are sufficient to pay for public services are doing much better than we are wrt deaths from Covid19.

*shouldn't be increasingly glorified as how we fund the NHS

Schools are taxpayer funded, but they still benefit from fundraisers for things that otherwise they can't afford. These things make school much nicer for staff and pupils but there's not enough money for them.

How often do you think people put their lives in the hands of a school? Yes, charity is admirable but if the government hadn't starved both the education and health sectors it wouldn't be so desperately in need.

The way I see it is that people aren't actually "donating to the NHS" as an organisation per se (as in the money raised isn't paying wages or buying the day to day medicines or paying the electricity bill etc so that the government can sit back and do less) it is going towards the extras that make life more bearable and easier for the people (patients and staff) involved. Which is entirely different and surely a good thing?

Now if the donated money were to be paying the electricity bills, then you'd have a point.

Hospitals do have some charitable leagues which raise money for items such as machines, room decoration for children wards for examples, equipments that services lack etc...

It's great to contribute to this. Raising money for the nhs as as a whole is a drop in the ocean when it spends millions every hour.

The charities largely support staff, and many donations are for stuff which is 'nice' but not essential; such as iPads for NICU here so mums recovering from birth can video their poorly babies. It wouldn't necessarily be right to buy it out of the main budget, but it definitely enhances the experience. Likewise, things for staff rooms are sometimes bought from charitable donations beyond the 'essentials'. Underfunding and PPE is another matter, the charities do great work imo. I am sure you would be moaning if certain things were bought otherwise.

I work for the NHS.
There is not much work for me to do at the moment so I’ve been catching up on reading documents.
One of them I came across last week explained the process of how to apply for funding for equipment for the department. It was basically a flow chart going around in circles having to go to about 20 different meeting to get approval from everyone in those meetings before you can order the equipment.
How about streamline that process so it doesn’t take us years to get updated technology?

More worryingly is it becoming an US lead insurance run health service. Give it 6-12 months. BoJos going to need a shitload of cash from somewhere.

Ok I'll have a go.

What concerns me is the way that this situation is leading to widespread acceptance that the NHS is an organisation for which we regularly raise money. It muddies the water and draws people's attention away from the facts that we ALREADY fund the NHS via taxes, and the fact that the NHS has been so criminally starved of the oxygen of funding for a decade now.

And as I've said before on here, please don't try to tell me that the NHS's financial worries are due to poor management and waste. I'm not suggesting that those two things aren't issues, just that they are a tiny drop in the ocean of the underfunding.

Originally the NHS was to keep seriously ill and injured people alive and fit enough to work.

Then the demands became greater - it was expanded to be available for less serious ailments which would previously have been addressed at home, but which were better treated professionally.

Then it moved on to not just providing appropriate treatment/surgery, but also providing a good cosmetic result - so surgery didn't have to just be effective, the scar had to be tiny and neat etc etc etc

Then it was expected to be there for "vanity" operations - breast enlargements etc (yes - for some people this was important for mental health, but plenty demanded them for bigger, better whatever that they wanted but wouldn't or couldn't pay for themselves) - and added to this became the repairs for surgery that many people had done abroad privately because it was cheaper, but which ended up being botched.

And all the way through this were increasing numbers of "health tourists" who deliberately travelled to the UK for free treatment - theoretically this money can be recouped from many governments; in practical terms it rarely is - as well as advances in medical science which mean that the service supplies more and more procedures, requiring more and more expensive equipment and drugs, and more specialist and highly skilled staff.

And the patients now demand private rooms, televisions, a choice of menu, unlimited visiting hours which make actual nursing more difficult.

And procurement of even "minor" things (like soap) is locked into particular suppliers - there seems to be no transparency about how contracts are awarded - who charge premium rates for what they supply.

There are ever more tiers of management; which may or may not be necessary - I don't know, but when cuts are made they always seem to be among the frontline workers - management seems protected.

And of course, there are people who aren't happy (like Branson) with some aspect suing the NHS and taking money out. How did he even succeed in that suit? Had he been the victim of a medical error which affected his life - fair enough - but all it was was that he didn't get a contract he wanted. So what? Isn't that what bidding for a contract is about? You might get it, you might not?

I think the NHS is amazing, and it should continue - but it needs a re-think as it is attempting to do things it wasn't designed for.

Well said, devil

The NHS purchasing system is absolutely scandalous. Don't even get me started on PFI, courtesy of Tony Blair.
NHS providers who manufacture PPE have been trying to supply it for weeks. There is no system in place to arrange orders. They have to email the cabinet office, fill in forms, wait, wait, wait, chase up, get told to fill in the same form again, on repeat. Eventually give up and sell it to South Korea and NZ.

It is a very sad day for the NHS when their communities are having to sew their PPE while the government continue to pretend they are in control and there is no shortage. While the government pretend their lack of planning hasn't cost health workers their lives. Shame on them.

Yeah, like the army buying their own stuff during the Iraq war under Labour...shocking, isn’t it?

There's a charity arm of the NHS which helps provide money to medical research

What @devildeepbluesea said!

My worry is (and this thread seems to have plenty of evidence for this) that the current situation is normalising a chronically underfunded NHS in the minds of the nation. And I fear that is far too convenient for agendas of certain politicians.

So OP, YANBU! Although think other posters have subsequently explained it better.

Do you also think that PTAs should not fundraiser for their schools?

Or grant-giving bodies should not support individuals in benefits?

Or should such things all be government funded in their entirety?

i really do not think there is any benefit in deciding that because the government is active in an area it should be the sole actor in that field. Especially as quite a lot of what is now the NHS pre-dated its founding and is inherently charity owned. (A regular complicating feature of major rebuilds and site moves)

I have volunteered for a couple of NHS charities. Both related to cancer care and research. They contribute whole salaries for research staff and equipment. They fund research nurses who actually provide a lot of care for patients in hospital and the community. One of the biggest issues is the way NHS trust management constantly try to find ways to channel the charity money/staff to other departments. I understand why they do it, but it isn't legal and creates a lot of stress for those staff.

@noavailablename which is silly as NHS proc isn't usually centralised, so there's likely a new team who have been thrown together or moved from other stuff to manage the supplier portal, when it's normally done at a trust level; even hospital in some cases usually. They could have collated local suppliers, actually had the manpower to deal with responses, and that would have amounted to a lot of bits of kit. Instead something strategic is whisked away.

I also agree about the army buying their own stuff, it's ridiculous. And charities like H4H shouldn't have to exist, but here we are. Things like this: metro.co.uk/2019/05/14/veteran-suicide-hidden-epidemic-government-ignoring-9525180/ are fucking disgusting. I genuinely really, really, really hope that the government provides support for those medical personnel and support staff who will need it after this, otherwise these charities will be left to pick up the pieces.

@monty I agree with you. It's a subtle, insidious change, designed to make people think that the NHS is not a right, is something for the 'deserving'. It's not. We pay for it in our taxes, there is plenty of money in our economy to fund it better - and yes it does need an overhaul, and possibly a part-fund model like they have in France - but it is OURS.

The main issue with the NHS is that it is politicised. It should be taken out of political control and managed independently to the Government. Too often it is used as a political football, being changed on a whim (targets!, no targets!) to suit politicians, many of whom don't give a shit (many do). Funding models changed so that trusts can't plan properly, meddling in pay levels etc.

But the real issue here is that if we the owners of the NHS let our current politicians believe that it's not ours, we will let them take it away, sell it to their mates (already done in large parts) and we will lose it altogether.

No more forelock tugging 'we are so grateful for our health service' , it should be more of a 'what the hell are you doing to MY health service? Get your greedy, capitalist hands off it!!!'

Any donations should be for nice add-ons like iPads for communication, staff treats or taxis to/from work for exhausted staff, not essentials or basics. We the taxpayer have got those covered (or should have )

There have been a spate of NHS 'isn't fit for purpose, fund it or turn it into a different model' posts. This one is strangely angry.

I work on a children's ward. Money from charity donations goes towards decorating the ward with murals, buying TV's for each bed, buying crockery and appliances for the parents room, buying parent beds so they can stay on something comfortable next to their child. None of these are essential but it makes being in hospital better for the kids and their family.
Surely it's better for these things to be funded via donations so the actual hospital budget can go towards equipment, staff and all the essentials.

A lot of people really gave NO idea of the scale of the day to day costs of the NHS. A quick Google reveals the income of my local district general hospital is around £300m; my local city teaching hospital is around £600m. They are HUGE numbers, replicated hundreds of times nationwide. In the same area, there are also primary care, mental health and specialist treatment centre costs too. So for Capitan Tom £27m is a HUGE amount, a massive achievement, and an unimaginable sum for most of us. But when you look at the scale of it, it really is a tiny drop in the ocean nationally.

NHS charities have always been there, fundraising for the 'nice to haves' that make the care experience that much better. The NHS is a hugely complicated financial system that people just don't see at the point of care. The vast majority of outgoings relate to staffing costs. The best Irvine we could hope for from this is that rather than government or NHS bashing, the nation gets a much better understanding of the true cost of healthcare, and the immense value of the'no questions asked' approach at the point of need. Don't get me wrong, there are no rose-tinted glasses here. But it really is an awesome thing.