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 😭

The NHS has changed massively since he came about in 1948. We also have a much larger population than we did then to look after.

As others have pointed out the NHS is made up of lots of different charitable arms. The NHS does a fantastic job, but like anything else at times it has failings.

This really isn't the time to critise the NHS, and I am not sure why you are so angry about this?

We need a system similar to Australia. Private health is obligatory over the age of 30 and as long as you earns certain amount.

Is this true?

I was in Australia last year with family due to a bereavement and there were lots of people discussing how they either would or had cancelled their private healthcare because it was a total waste of money. There were a mix of high and (presumably) low earners having these conversations.

This was prompted by a discussion about the poor care that someone with a life limiting and eventual led terminal condition had received towards the end of her life.

The nhs isnt a charity but as people have said you can donate certain items eg ex cerise bike, a bench for the garden, a certain expensive piece of medical equipment, the much needed chairs for whats laughing called our rest room which are vvv old and uncomfortable. Donations arent used for the care but the support. When nhs was set up it was birth and death. Medical care has expanded since then eg cancer care so every donation helps!

I believe the nhs has lost it's way. Its become too big and spread its pot of money too thinly across too many departments. It need to be how it used to be, focused on saving lives and maternity. Cosmetic surgery for low esteemed people should not be on the nhs. There are so many areas that could be cut back on, to ensure the core has enough money to run sufficiently. Outsourcing meals is a terrible money drain. Many new hospitals have no kitchens as they no longer cook for patients.

The concern for me is that the NHS is being positioned as a charity for political purposes, much as it was positioned during the Leave campaign as a beneficiary of Brexit. It moves the eye away from issues such as the impact on the NHS of, for example, immigration policy and privatisation.

@Heartlake, absolutely right. I'm really fed up of reading threads from people who think their opinion of the nhs is perfectly valid despite being based on misguided, uneducated and media led information.

As you say, most people have no concept of costs when it comes to the nhs. I bet if national survey was conducted asking the nation what they thought the nhs highest costs were, they'd get totally wrong citing management waste, foreign visitors when these account to less than 3%, and totally miss the fact that the biggest cost is treatment of diabetes and diabetic related complications.

It's hard to have a purposeful debate when people are so clueless. It would be like debating with people insisting that we have a serious polution problem because of people smoking ouside and that we should pay more taxes so that people could fly more often around the world without a care!

@BagpussAteMyHomework this is exactly the worry I share! And I think they're sadly doing a very very good PR job of it.

Also, I fear that we're seeing (and have for a long time been seeing "let's chronically underfunded it for so long that eventually we can conclude it's no longer fit for purpose and should've replaced by a combination of private and third party providers"...

@dontdisturbmenow great post! You're absolutely right.

Thanks apples :)

This is all stuff that wouldn't be budgeted for otherwise. Sometimes NHS budgets cover wages and essentials and that's it. It's not ideal, but it's the way it is, and the above are seen as "nice to haves" rather than essentials.

^ no no no no no. I doubt there is a single department where this is the case. The NHS is run badly by people who have no idea of how to manage multi million pound budgets (often nurses who have worked their way up to managerial positions rather than qualified finance bods), they have no idea of how to negotiate contracts and are forced to buy all of their supplies from NHS Supplies who charge over the odds for everything.

Lack of money is not an issue in the NHS, you could double budgets tomorrow and it's make no difference.

So what?
And it’s not ‘chronically underfunded’ either. It’s currently funded £140 BILLION POUNDS a year.

It's not a charity, but neither are schools.

Yet underfunding and cuts mean both public services end up relying on donations.

Sometimes parents (like me) make a donation to support the school, because I care about the school and want to support teachers etc.

It doesn't make underfunding and cuts right, but I don't want to see that school (or the kids) suffer.

Sometimes it's to do.something nice. A parent once bought the kids in their son's year group ice creams on the last day of primary school, by donating. They wanted to do something nice. Same with somebody fundraising for our local children's hospital.

And it’s not ‘chronically underfunded’ either. It’s currently funded £140 BILLION POUNDS a year.

It doesn't matter how large the amount of funding looks, if it is not enough to fund the services it is indeed chronically underfunded.

People think there is a magic money tree that pays for tax payer funded things like schools and the NHS. Often people believe that the "rich " (the middle class rather than billionaires) should just pay more taxes and that solves the problem. The issue with that is it isn't passively fair for those that have worked hard to have to pay more to subsidise those that don't work.

The secondary problem with the NHS is a lack of personal responsibility for our health. We are a nation with a terrible concept of nutrition, weight and exercise. Chicken nuggets and chips for children as a regular food source rather than a one a month lazy night, lack of fruit and veg in everyone's diet, a misguided idea of what overweight looks like (a lot smaller than you think). There is also the culture of its "cool" to drink to exercise. All the paeds the prosecco tacky signs you can buy say alcohol is misused. People that still smoke despite knowing the health risks.

If the NHS didn't have to support entirely preventable diseases or those that would be seen a lot less frequently with better lifestyles) then money would be more readily available.

I would suggest a system where you pay a small amount (£10?) That no one would miss each time you go to the gp or a&e. Specialist care would continue to be free. However, yearly health checks for bmi, carbon monoxide in the system, liver function indicate whether you are looking after yourself. If not, a support package is put in place to gel you change. If you don't after 12 months you are not covered in NHS for diseases related to your lifestyle. A public insurance system could be set up that you pay into to cover those illnesses.

Whenever a change of funding is mooted, everybody jumps straight to comparison with the USA system.
The health care system in France and Germany is a mixture of state and private funding. Everybody has insurance according to their income. It is a co-pay system with state support and funding. Everyone I know who lives in those countries say it works very well.
They seem to be a lot better at funding things like physiotherapy and preventative/early intervention. In France all women get post birth physio for example.
IME the NHS is not great at preventing complications, particularly with chronic disease, for example.

"It's not a dream and it doesn't need to end angry"

Yes, this.

It could go either way OP. maybe this stupid mythologising of doctors and nurses will make it impossible to disband the NHS.
But more likely, i fear, is that this "charity" narrative will send us back to Victorian times....

It's Powered by tax, not love....

When all's said and done, we , the people need to tell our politicians where to focus our money. Is it on defence, schools, HS2 vanity projects or more HMRC staff to bring in billions of non paid tax by huge profitable corporations? There is still plenty of money in our country. Don't let anyone tell you there isn't. They 'found' a minimum £6bn for brexit for example. We are not a bottomless pit, but I firmly believe that people don't really understand the basics - we have plenty of money but it just being diverted to places that many (most?) of us don't want.

Supplementary funding from charity is lovely but we must never let it replace the centralised, guaranteed funding from our taxes, that offers us all a right to treatment.

Agree the NHS is not a charity however the NHS is not the same one that was created all those years ago I.e. Society has changed, medical science has come a long way, expectations have been raised.

If people wish to donate to provide additional facilities or equipment to benefit others who use the NHS I don’t see an issue.

I would be happy to pay more tax if I knew the money raised would go direct to the people on the front line and not swallowed up in the Treasury coffers.

If people did not donate to the charities within the NHS, then what we take for granted would not be there, then wait for the howls of anguish.

The NHS need a good shake up to bring it into line with the 21st century, I.e. cut waste and if need be, pay the people what they are worth.

When the new normal post CV19 starts, a lot of hard questions need to be asked regarding how much we need to properly fund the NHS.

This pandemic has brought into focus what is really important and it is not highly paid journalists or football players

Tax rises are coming to fund the fall out of CV19

It does make me uneasy when a million pounds is raised for the NHS, when we know is that all that will happen is that the government will feel justified in investing a million pounds less in the NHS and pissing it away on folly like Brexit bureaucracy instead.

The NHS was set up as a simple health system to mend broken legs etc

It was not set up to fund, gastric banding, IVF, sex changes, people coming in from abroad who have not contributed, etc

Is the NHS underfunded or is it badly managed? I've certainly heard from some staff of wasteful practices (they despair) but is that true of the organisation as a whole?

Why are you so angry OP?

Nobody is being forced to donate money to the NHS charities, people choose to do it.

I just really don't understand your post?

As PP have said it's not a charity but it DOES have charities within it. If people want to donate then what's the issue?

I'm so confused 🙈

The charities in the hospitals I have worked at provide the extras which can improve well being eg art and aromatherapy for cancer patients, fish tanks in palliative care units, toys for children and sometimes even state of the art diagnostics and treatment which can then be bought much quicker - the staff and maintenance then paid for by NHS.
It also gives a sense of community amongst the local people.

Maybe all the oldies (age 75+) being shielded & protected by the economy-destroying measures could change their wills to leave any estate to NHS. To help make up to the entire < 30 generation for the future sacrifices that the < 30s will have to make in wake of c19.

Yeah I know. I live in fantasy land.

Perhaps public health messaging should be changed to “stop smoking, cut alcohol and sugar consumption and exercise regularly TO PROTECT THE NHS”.