Protect the NHS?

[kennelmaid]

AIBU to think that while we are so busy protecting the NHS, the country is going to be so financially broken that we will no longer be able to fund it in its current form?

It’s a huge huge worry - and anyone who doesn’t think so is woefully ill informed.

I agree we cannot have the NHS collapse, so organisations that involve a lot of mixing need to close, but otherwise we need to keep everything else going as much as possible, the vaccines rolling out as quickly as possible, restrictions lifted as quickly as possible, more public spending (counter intuitively) to motor the economy forward as soon as we are sure this is over back end of the year - and better funding and organisation of the NHS to make sure that it isn’t so vulnerable in future, not to mention an active plan for future pandemics.

It does amaze me quite often how many people on mumsnet think money grows on trees.

They don't bloody want to keep it. They want it to collapse so it can be privatised. This is a perfect guise.

The whole thing is baffling to me.
They cancelled my mums appointments numerous times so by the time we found out what was going on, cancer has eaten away at her face.

My friends are out of work, universal credit isn't enough to pay the mortgages. Locally they are handing out food hampers to those affected.

We need to get to some normality ASAP.

Irrespective if the healthcare system was private or public we would still have to protect it in a pandemic .

Can't believe people don't realise that. It's been unsustainable in its current form for years! The only thing they're trying to avoid is shit sticking to them in any form. Plus All anyone at that level in politics is really worried about is personal progression for themselves and their cronies, and glory/a name in the history books.

Never give that much power to someone who wants it, it always corrupts in the end.

Excuse me I'm having a really bad day.

You must have missed the memo OP......only covid matters.

YANBU, anyone who doesn't worry about the future funding of the NHS are kidding themselves. There's so much more money going out of the pot than coming in at the moment and yet people still want more. The financial implications of all these lockdowns will hit everything and everyone in future.

They don't bloody want to keep it. They want it to collapse so it can be privatised. This is a perfect guise.

Classic disaster capitalism.

parallax they must've been rubbing their hands together with glee at this one eh.

The financial effects of covid are going to have far reaching implications for decades to come. We're borrowing hundreds of billions and yet there are still businesses failing at an alarming rate, unemployment rising, people losing their homes, etc. Yes, you can't blame the govt for everything, but The Chancellors' bungling of furlough, covid loan fraud, no support for 3 million excluded self employed, SEISS grants for self employed who don't need it, "eat out to spread covid" last Autumn, etc., has been a chaotic catastrophe that may well have done more harm than good. The only people who think Rishi has done a done job are those lucky enough to have benefitted - everyone else has been badly let down by his scattergun approach.

I hate to think how much extra is being thrown at the NHS to deal with covid AND other things. My OH restarts cancer treatment next week. Saw the oncologist a couple of days ago. They're not doing the normal treatment because it's too dangerous (needs twice weekly chemo in the hospital and they're not doing that because they want to keep people out of hospital), so they're going to a different treatment, apparently 10 times more expensive, which is a tablet form of chemo which can be taken at home instead. Good on them for reducing the number of people going in/out of hospitals, but that's just throwing even more money at covid (by the back door) that in normal times wouldn't have been needed.

I genuinely believe covid could cost us a trillion pounds when all things are considered, as it will almost certainly have lasted 2 years before we start on the road to recovery, and there'll also be longer term costs that continue for years to come.

I suppose the question is, if everything was open and the virus was rising exponetially and ICU was full so there were lots of difficult decisions being made about who got beds what would be different economically? Certainly you wouldnt be more likely to get cancer treatment with uncontrolled virus compared to controlled virus. It would be even less likely.

Would you go to the cinema? Or a restuarant and eat in, or the gym or bowling? Or go have your nails done or just mooch around the shops. How would those businesses manage if their staff were off ill.
I know plenty of people would particularly young fit people, but would they be enough to keep the businesses open and profitable alone? Would there be even more redundacies compared to now with furlough and rules.

Its hard to know.

@2020canfuckitself

Sorry about your mum. But:

We need to get to some normality ASAP

Yes I agree but HOW?

Yes people are suffering financially because of lockdown. And despite lockdown the NHS is cancelling cancer appointments because it is so overwhelmed But what’s the alternative?

Let businesses open, let the virus run riot, prioritise normal non-covid NHS treatment and just tens or hundreds or thousands of people to die at home from covid with no NHS help? Because that is what would happen.

I can’t see a way out of where we are other than lockdown hard now to stop things spiralling completely out of control and hope we can roll out the vaccine quickly and effectively and it will be enough to get us out of the worst of it.

I agree, however, 'protect the NHS' means, in reality, trying to make sure that there's capacity for the Covid cases that need it - at present, certainly in the South East, it's collapsing, and people will die due to lack of capacity.

I don't have a solution. The pandemic has been so mismanaged. More should have been done to ensure schools were safe, could open in a way that enabled proper infection control, instead of the govt just repeatedly claiming they were - that in itself could have ensured we weren't in this position now, where we have 4000 patients on ventilators and a Hurricane Katrina level of death every single day, where 20000 people have died in 3 weeks.

It was reported on week of 6 Nov that 30k NHS workers were off either with, or self isolating as a result of contact with a case of, Covid. No breakdown currently given of how many had the infection. That is, however, 2.5% ish of all NHS workers, and although a horrendous amount, actually represents a fall. At one point, NHS sickness data shows that it was 8% in the early part of the pandemic.

Never made the news that 4% of teachers (20k ish) were also off that week, and similar numbers in subsequent weeks, a quarter of whom had tested positive for Covid (dfe data), and that infection rates in schools among staff and pupils were above rates in the wider community. Well above by December, in fact. We were told schools were safe that week, that they wouldn't be shut in the 2-week lockdown. Never made the news that in the data used to 'prove' the rhetoric that teachers were not contracting it more, sample sizes were so skewed as to make it meaningless, to the point where the ONS has been challenged by the statistics regulator. Or that the teacher death figures (of 65) used were from March 2020-May 2020 during which period schools were off altogether for 2 weeks (Easter) and thereafter, nationally, according to dfe stats, had approx 1.5% of kids in.

We have ended up with rampant community transmission - the area I work in had an infection rate of 2.8 in July and this was over 1000 by the end of December. There are no critical care beds available in the 2 nearest hospitals, and both have been asking people not even to attend A&E. I don't see what option is left other than hunker down and try to avoid each other until transmission rates fall enough to ease pressure. The mental health, and economic fallouts are going to be catastrophic though. As is the effect on the outcomes of many, many children.

*20k of teachers off with Covid or self isolating

A lot of those people dying at home would be healthcare workers too and the levels of sickness would be astronomical. Even just leaving covid patients to die and not treating them wouldn’t get your non-covid treatment done.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

...yes, and other businesses would also have to close because the rate of sickness. And people would vote with their feet and not be going out to restaurant, cinemas etc of their own volition, so businesses would still be going under.

Yes we’re going to be paying the economic cost of this for decades to come, it’s inevitable. That would be true whatever choices we made now.

To be clear we're 'protecting the NHS' so it can protect people. The motivation is not to look after NHS staff, it is to try and save as many lives as possible.

I agree its something I worry about

Part of what we are seeing is an unprecedented demand on the nhs, but its also highlighting how little resilience the nhs has due to years of cutting back.

Its the equivilant of putting no fuel or maintaince for your car and that's been fine because you've been coasting around town, but now all of a sudden there's a marathon to drive uphill and the car doesn't cope.

For example

We used to have cottage hospitals or outlying wards. Wards have been cut and district hospitals closed, thus those people with cancer ops could have been separated out or proper green zones established, but now there are no spaces.

I work in mental health so should be fairly unaffected by the actual covid side however...

• mh wards have been over run with covid cases, thus have had to be quarantined. We used to have 5 wards in this area. We now have 3. We were already at stages were there were days with no beds, there is no back up for a ward being closed

• staffing. My area has rolling vacancies, where we advertise 24/7 because we lose staff quicker than we can recruit. There's lots of reasons for this outside covid including withdrawn of bursary and people finding the work unmanagable and leaving nhs

With the existing number of vacancies, the added burden of extra sickness (actually sick, or having to isolate) and increased demand for things like home visits/ extra time needed for certain clinical tasks then things fall apart.

When my team was fully staffed then were able to cope with things like sickness but when you are on bare minimum staffing , an extra 15 min between each appointment is enough to cause problems

Other areas have the same staffing issues so our staff are being -poached- redeployed to other teams that have mandatory ratios (my team does not). Similar issues there in that wards were using high levels of bank staff and simply don't have enough staffing reserves to cover sickness currently let alone the increased care someone who is physically ill needs

The cracks are suddenly very apparent when the nhs is pushed

If anyone actually cared about the nhs they'd have funded it properly years ago.

And the public would not have abused it.

Its so infuriating to see so many bloody hypocrites outside clapping during the first lock down and politicians suddenly apparently caring about it when patients had already been waiting years for surgeries and appointments and police akd paramedics spend significant chunks of their day picking up old people off the floor and talking mentally ill people off ledges and being tied up all day making phone calls trying to get the poor buggers seen by someone, anyone.

If only as much interest and money had been poured into services so they were properly taken care of when they got sent home from hospitals and didn't have to suffer the indignity of lying on a bathroom floor for hours or received proper mental health care.

But now nothing apparently matters but covid

[quote Bubbinsmakesthree]@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

...yes, and other businesses would also have to close because the rate of sickness. And people would vote with their feet and not be going out to restaurant, cinemas etc of their own volition, so businesses would still be going under.

Yes we’re going to be paying the economic cost of this for decades to come, it’s inevitable. That would be true whatever choices we made now.[/quote]
Do you know what the really stupid thing is? We know this from the 1918 pandemic and from dealing with epidemic viruses elsewhere in the world. We know that places that have hard, early lockdowns tend to fare better in the short and long term. We got stupidly caught up in an argument about economy vs lives when the real argument is control the virus, protect healthcare and the economy vs don’t control it cripple healthcare, kill people and destroy the economy in the process.

Are we really better of having had measures in place for nearly a year and some sectors I.e. arts never really getting sorted than we would have been if we’d gone for an elimination strategy, which might not quite have been perfect but would have allowed mass gatherings and pubs/restaurants to have opened at full capacity for at least some of those months?

I think the "all anybody cares about is covid" is a bit of a misdirection

As said above i work in mh, and we are all still here trying to balance the concerns of a big work load vs covid. Its not that im not focusing on mental health but that covid affects lots of my choices from where is open to refer someone to, what beds are available to how many staff are working today (interms of staff isolating, shielding, or being redeployed). It can not be service as usual

Covid has touched probably every area of the nhs even those who aren't managing "covid" patients , from staff sickness rates, staff who are vulnerable, to having to decide if you operate on someone knowing there is a chance that they are safer at home then on your wards.

• I suppose the question is, if everything was open and the virus was rising exponetially and ICU was full so there were lots of difficult decisions being made about who got beds what would be different economically? Certainly you wouldnt be more likely to get cancer treatment with uncontrolled virus compared to controlled virus. It would be even less likely.

Would you go to the cinema? Or a restuarant and eat in, or the gym or bowling? Or go have your nails done or just mooch around the shops. How would those businesses manage if their staff were off ill.*

Basically what this pp said. Unfortunately it's controlled virus vs uncontrolled, ignoring the virus as going on as normal wouldn't magically fix anything, it would simply mean a lot more dead/chronically ill and economic fuckery. It's magical thinking to think otherwise.

Fun living through a once in a century event!