To hate what covid has done to the rest of the health service

[Dishwashersaurous]

I need an operation. Haven't seen a consultant in over a year due to covid. Finally, following telephone appointment I've been listed for the surgery.

I'm in constant pain and barely able to get out of bed most days.

I phoned to find how long the waiting list is. Due to covid its over a year.

I then investigated taking out a loan to go privately. The private wing at the hospital have just told me that due to covid they are not doing any overnight stays for months.

So I will probably lose my job ic I have to wait until a year. And I will be in constant pain. And all due to covid

It really hasnt
People who have a different experience and opinion than you are not trolls
No one slagged off front line workers until someone stating they were one was nasty to a woman who lost her child and started accusing anyone who didn't agree of being a covid denier etc.
People were talking about their experiences of the NHS as a whole.
Not treating cancer patients, people with chronic pain and heart disease etc during the summer when the death rate was lower than the risk of being run over or falling down the stairs is appalling.

Choice ? I just want a well functioning local hospital with high quality care. Not bothered about choice.

Occasional brilliant but usually shite

Yes. Agree @buggerbognor. That has been my (extensive) experience of NHS too (with two children who need a lot of services, and my own experience of working in the NHS too).

And when people dare to criticise (or complain to) the NHS, the backlash is quite phenomenal. (See Dr Sara Ryan on Twitter, who has written extensively on this).

If you want consultants to work for the nhs more and not private hospitals then the nhs needs to pay them as much as the private hospitals do. This is not about the nhs staff who do an incredible job. It's not even about the big wigs in the nhs who have to decide how to prioritise with the relative scare resources vs our expectations. It's not even about the government who were actually voted in BY US to keep our taxes low. This is about voters not wanting to vote for someone who will take more money out of our pockets (or those of big businesses) to fund a service that's capable of giving us what we want.

What we expect costs money. The high level of safety and service we demand costs money. Yes some money is wasted as it is in any large organisation but we need to stop saying 'they' should do it better and start voting for the services we want and be prepared to pay for it.

Can you imagine what we would be saying now if the government had decided to prioritise non urgent patients a year ago when people were turning up in droves hardly able to breathe. Can you imagine how many would have died if the scarce staff resources were spent on non life threatening conditions whilst even more people died.

I appreciate you are in pain (as am I incidentally with a nasty bout of sciatica which has gone on for 6 months now) but you are alive. Many are not and many more would not be if we had not diverted staff to treat them.

Well said Acovic the importance of the NHS is why i never have, and never will, vote Tory.

I'm sure there's an element of underfunding, and some blame lies with this government. However - the NHS is woefully inefficient, heavily populated with management, and bullying is rife. Sort the bullying problem and you've probably reduced sickness and retention and increased the number of people available to provide care straight away.

I can also give a very specific example of inefficiency; I had gestational diabetes. Every week I had to bring my little book of bloods to join a 6 hour long group clinic. It took 1.5 hours each way on 3 buses) Each clinic consists of less than 6 minutes with healthcare workers and the rest spent in a waiting room on a conveyor belt of patients. We each showed our book to a diabetes nurse, then a consultant, then a midwife (who did not once speak to me about anything unrelated to blood sugar - no birth preferences, no feeding/ baby related anything - nada) In other countries you email or text in your bloods and attend a clinic only if there is something to discuss. Why don't we do that?? It would probably halve the number of clinics you need to run.

After the birth I took up a bed for 2 full days despite being verbally declared fit to go home,
because people kept forgetting to fill in my discharge papers.

I've no doubt that covid impacts resources to an extent, and I appreciate many nhs workers(including immediate family members) but the inefficiency and mismanagement must be playing a bigger part than covid.

I don't think anyone on here is questioning how hard most frontline NHS staff work, but what has the government (who bear the brunt of my frustration, can't speak for anyone else) done since the pandemic began or in fact since the Brexit referendum result to encourage either overseas medical staff over here, or more school leavers to study medicine, nursing, healthcare? Or to address the shortage of beds in our hospitals?

The rest of the health service more or less defunct for a few months while they got a handle on the crisis? Fine. More than than and it seems rather like negligence.

@Natty13 omg it must have been horrendous the job is difficult enough as it is sending my appreciation it probably doesn't mean much but the majority of people don't feel this way x

@OverTheRainbow88

We’re on week 31 of waiting SALT. 😬

We are over 100 weeks in, I don't even bother checking anymore, went private.

@forinborin

Holy moly...!! Was private worth it?

"We’ve also got quite an impressively high number of Covid deaths, so if the NHS was diverting resources to stop people dying then it’s not made a very good fist of that either"

You can't blame the NHS for our governments mismanagement of the pandemic. If we had restricted international travel/locked down sooner etc etc then the strain on the nhs would have been more manageable.

This is the problem when the term NHS is made emotional. It's actually why it was made emotional, I am sure.

Criticism of national healthcare system and how it functions is not an attack on individual staff.
Organisations like this must be criticised when needed (and praised when deserved) otherwise it will never ever gets better.

That's why someone made sure that "NHS" evokes an emotional patriotic response and it's thought of more like a person rather than a national healthcare system.

The issues must be talked about. And no, they aren't an attack on individual workers. I mean like let's be frank here, as pp said. Our families in other countries were still receiving treatments. I also know many foreigners who rather go anfld pay healtcare in their native countries because they couldn't get a treatment even pre covid with the waiting times. I grew up with free at point of entry (incl dentist) healthcare. It can work well, it can be shit, it can be both. People should be able to say their experience and problems without being guilted or attacked.

[quote OverTheRainbow88]@forinborin

Holy moly...!! Was private worth it?[/quote]
Yes and no. The main thing for me was getting an expert opinion, to be honest. By the way, we were seen by someone who we (most likely) were queuing to see on the NHS anyway, but privately we could get in with two weeks notice, on the NHS it was more than two years (and counting).

What most people see as mismanagement is actually severe underfunding. You can't plan an efficient service when every day consists of fire fighting.

The bullying I see from the inside is the result of cost pressure and high stress levels in individuals. Ie managers are tasked with improving services at the same time as reducing costs rather than being allowed to make investments which will see long term improvement. There is no long term view it's all about pressure to save save save in the short term.
There is no flexibility in the system to allow the people who can make improvements the ability to do so.
Cost pressures result in staff being expected to do more and more for less and less, then you get staff leaving and now we have a chronic staff shortage.

The first wave we didn't need to shut as fast and hard as we did but all we had to go on was Italy and we were told we'd have vented patients everywhere that could take a bed.

The second time no surgery stopped until we had to move ICU into theatres recovery, surgeons and anaesthetist practitioners were needed in ICU.

Yes it's shit but it was that or let people die at the front door. Our small hospital went from 8 ICU beds to 32. A large number of ICU surge beds are still in use in London. Surge beds= theatres.

There's no way around it without more ICU and general medical beds per 100,000 population.

All consultants in the first wave were working on Covid patients. In the second all bar cancer & cardiac.

Pain is awful (I speak as a chronic pain sufferer) but it's not life threatening. Unfortunately cancer catch up has to take priority and after that it's those that waited longest.

Independent sector have been NHS for most of it. Private areas of NHs hospitals are still being used for social distancing and Covid.

@CirclesWithinCircles European countries have greater beds per 100,000 and not all escaped, look at Italy

@Natty13 100% the disconnect from the reality is unreal

But yeah, keep telling yourselves that the "big wigs" could have found a way to keep other services going you absolute ignorant *.

This.
Big wigs. Hmm. You mean the NHS staff who have been saying for 10 years now that the NHS is chronically underfunded and understaffed in all areas, and who were expected to basically magic up equipment, beds, staff and deal with a tsunami of patients in an afternoon?

Seriously? You dare to criticise the NHS for doing what the govt told it to do? Do you have any idea what a political football our NHS is and do you realise that in the middle of a fucking pandemic the govt decides to disband the organisation it needs to properly carry out track and trace (not the servo funded bollocks)? And do you realise that as we come out of this wave, with exhausted clinical and non clinical staff, the govt decides it is going to have another fucking re organisation? I've totally lost track of how many re organisations there have been in the last decade, but I can tell you this - each one has led to less money going into the NHS for patient care.

Maybe do something useful and don't vote Tory instead of coming on here and bitching about something you know nothing about.

Covid is being used as an excuse in many cases when the NHS wasn't coping before hand.

DS has an ent appointment to hopefully be seen in person in August, that'll be 2 years after referal.

It's taken three months since first seizure to today be refered for an eeg.

System doesn't work and we don't have enough doctors and nurses.

Because they’re all individually run not centralised they can’t say right x surgery has no GP’s able to see people because they’re shielding so we’ll swap 2 staff with staff from y because they have more staff able to physically see people. But the government outsourced it all so it’s not centralised in any way.

I think you'll find that GPs have been independent contractors since the inception of the NHS.

It does amaze me how people believe they have the skills to suggest improvements to the NHS when they don't understand the fundamentals of how it actually works.

Hamandcheeselife is definitely right. There's been issues for years, and access to timely diagnosis and good care had become a real postcode lottery a long time before Covid.

Well Labour didn't exactly leave the NHS in a good place. PFI's have had a massive impact on budgets. Yes, the Tory's have run it down further, but I am not sure if any political party has much desire to change things.

Just to add though, not every consultant was pulled into covid care, they were still there for emergency care.

I'm sorry you've had such a struggle to get care for your ds @Hamandcheeselife

I agree with a PP. The NHS is badly underfunded. I also agree with others that there's a problem in some areas of mismanagement.