To ask why the NHS is cancelling operations?!

[CFEC]

I'm due to have a (much needed and waited for) op in a few weeks time, I've just rung my consultant's secretary as I haven't had a pre-op appointment letter through yet and queried it, as I wanted to make sure the operation is definitely going ahead as if nothing else, I'll be off work for 2 weeks and my boss would ideally like confirmation.

She said 'Oh, well they're cancelling A LOT of inpatient appointments, but as you'll be a day patient no, I think yours will go ahead.'

I swear I will lose my sh&^ and cry if it gets cancelled again, this will be the third time!!!

Why is the NHS cancelling operations left, right and centre?! Surely it can't be due to Covid still? If it is, what is going to happen to us all, so many people are going to die surely as a result of not getting treatment? A lot more than with Covid! Most people are double vaccinated now, this virus isn't going away, why are operations for in patients being cancelled?

Staffing issues. Even being doubled jabbed doesn't stop you getting covid & while you may not be as ill you still have to isolate if you catch it.

The NHS is poorly run and a money pit. It performs worse than average compared to similar countries on 8 out of 12 of the most common causes of death including breast cancer and lung cancer and has consistently higher rates for death of babies at birth and in the month after birth. Spending just goes up and up - in the 70's it was around 40 billion, in the year 2000 around 80 billion, in 2018/19 it was 150 billion, 20/21 set to be 212 billion. When it started it was around 3% of GDP, now it's around 8.

I know of a local hospital site bought at a premium price, completely refurbed and then sold at a rock bottom price to 'save money'. This is the sort of money wastage that goes on all the time. There will never be enough money for the NHS no matter how much tax people pay. I ended up going private when I gave birth because maternity services were a complete shambles. It's such a shame that it's such a mess but no surprise when they want to centralise everything so it becomes huge and totally impersonal and anonymous, no proper continuity, no one knows you, you phone up to find out about someone and are sent all round the houses and then they often have no idea and say phone back later. There are far too many managers, staff are treated like shit, expected to work all hours and must feel like no one really gives a shit about them. People leave all the time because of this and then they wonder why.

When I've visited friends/relatives in hospital it's made me shudder, one had someone next to him who kept shouting to him and kicking off so that security had to be called and another had his bed right opposite the toilets and elderly patients would go toilet and just leave the door open, it was not pleasant. They're not cleaned properly either, scum rings round a bath they wanted me to go in. I would always go private if you have the option, the service is completely different in my experience.

I've been saying for years that it should be privatised

It’s unclear how that would help, especially if you think the US model is the way to go. That’s very expensive, even for those who are insured, and leaves many with inadequate or no medical care. The NHS, for all its faults, is cost-efficient and, at its best, unbeatable for the quality of care it provides. As pp have said, decades of underinvestment and politically motivated reorganisation have blunted its effectiveness and reduced the morale of staff.

@Blossomtoes

I don't think it's necessarily true that the British would prefer to pay less tax and have a less effective healthcare system. I think many Brits would happily pay an increased rate of tax if there was evidence that these extra funds were being managed effectively and fairly

Unfortunately history doesn’t bear you out. The NHS improved exponentially between 1997 and 2010. The British public then voted for austerity and here we are.

Well, Labour's proposed cuts were deeper at the time, but I don't think they would have savaged the NHS in the same way as the Tories have. But I was living abroad at the time of the election in 2010, so am prepared to be corrected. Sadly I returned to the UK just in time for 11 years of Tory rule and counting. If I'd known the bloody mess we'd be in I'd have stayed away.

My sister runs an out-patient department. Today, out of a team of eight two were present. Three had to self-isolate (one a staff member who had refused the vaccine, two with unvaccinated family members who had tested positive) and three on annual leave or day off. So yes, operations and procedures are being cancelled.

Whether or not you’re a fan of the KF is irrelevant @NotPersephone. The link shows the statistics for the duration of the Labour administration. The facts, inconvenient though you might find them.

Perfect storm of underfunding ,pandemic, loss of EU staff due to Brexit. On top of a background of constant meddling by successive governments where millions are wasted reshuffling the deckchairs on the titanic, yet nothing at the coalface ever changed except we got cheaper equipment which broke or wasn't compatible..
Plus an ageing workforce that has been known about for donkeys years.(large amount of staff where in their fifties). So many staff who would have stayed on part time at retirement age are jumping ship because of the seriously crap working conditions. I have over 36 years ICU experience and I asked to take my pension and return 1 shift a week. told I could but they would pay me £5 an hour less. Happily retired now and wont be going back even to do agency shifts. So they lost that expertise and they are doing this all across the NHS. Retention is dire because they dont value the staff they have.
A huge amount of money is wasted in the internal market the tory government created (priming for privatisation)

pre internal market. Need a drug for a patient, go to opposite ward and take from their stock cupboard.
Post internal market. Need a drug. cant lend from another ward because it comes out of their budget so they say no unless you generate the paperwork so that our ward could be billed or wait for an extra stock order from pharmacy and patient has to wait for the medication.
So you then have to employ more financial staff to manage all these new budgets. Plus auditors to check everything is being done right.. plus managers to oversee all these new administration staff.
In the 'old days' each hospital had its own budget and a single finance department to oversee the whole lot, much more cost effective than multiple budgets within the same hospital and the staff required to run that system

Capacity issues in hospitals have been there pre Covid. Covid has just made it even worse. There is a shortage of beds and staff.

OP, you can write to your MP and explain the issue. It’s a government problem as they have underfunded the NHS for several years

I'd be careful what you wished for though. The government closed the forensic science service and lost being a leader in research overnight. The private market hadn't coped well. Some things things aren't profitable to investigate (or treat, for that matter) and the raft of issues are just coming to the surface.
But enough derailing of this thread...

Staff retention is very poor. Staff are poorly paid for the work they do. Working conditions are dire. Brexit means many staff have gone back to their countries and it’s harder to get a visa to work in the UK now.

My main memory of the NHS 15 years ago is MRSA running rampant (I think 2 elderly relatives died from it).

All political parties have been awful with regard to the NHS. Blair brought in PFIs (yes I know John Major started it but New Labour absolutely embraced it) leaving trusts with dreadful debts and introduced targets and league tables which just mean that trusts are keen to manipulate figures. Tories introduced the Lansley Reforms which I think have been a disaster and have allowed private companies to make money from the easy bits (or hand back contracts if they're not making money from it).

All have been crap. All have failed to improve the training and retention of junior doctors. It's not fair on staff or patients but no-one has the bollocks to try to change things.

@bogoffmda

What most people do not realise is that 80% of the private healthcare in this country is delivered by the same NHS staff who do it in their own time. They are not separate they are integrally linked

I don’t think people ever think the staff is different?!?

You’re paying private to effectively queue jump. Or have more resources. Not different staff.

Well, Labour's proposed cuts were deeper at the time

I don’t think they were. In fact, they proposed tax rises. Which is probably why they lost the 2010 election.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/apr/12/labour-manifesto-at-a-glance

@herculesoffline

or have an income threshold to be able to access it

So what income do you think it would be unavailable at? Slightly higher than yours I suppose?

Probably!

My household are reasonably comfortable. On about the 60th percentile last time I checked the ONS website. Because we'd have no way of funding care for anything complex and the private health sector doesn't do the really difficult unusual stuff anyway, naturally we'd be tempted, particularly as we got older, to reduce our income to below the threshold in order to ensure continued entitlement if the worst happened. We would have plenty of company. It's an idiotic idea.

Google survival rates of post- operative Covid infection.

Last year (pre vaccinations) if you caught Covid post- general anaesthetic you had 25% chance of death. Even now post double jabbing I was advised to self-isolate for at least a week post op.

@CFEC you’ve written your OP as if the NHS had a choice. We’re cureermtly in a 3rd wave still, and in the first 2 covid was killing people on front of staffs eyes. People coming into A&E and needing ITU level support not to die. Faced with someone actively dying or someone in a lot of pain waiting for surgery but stable and alive at home, of course you have to triage the actively dying person.

It’s shit, the staff are fucked and need a break. The NHS has been slowly und refunded for years and doctors and nurses have tried to speak out. It needs more finding, less bureaucrats and more support from the public to not have it slowly undermined and privatised.

This isn’t an active decision by staff, it’s a trying to keep the most people alive decision.

My friend is a carer but can't work now due to having a catheter bag that hasn't been changed due to cancelled ops and he now has various other complications because of it. He is too weak to shout the loudest or even complain.

I would happily pay more tax if it meant an adequate and efficient health service and I’m sure many would agree with me.

With an ever increasing population, it just isn’t fit for purpose anymore.

Do Ireland (republic) and the rest of Europe have the same issues with their health service?

@TheRabbitStoleMyHat

In paediatrics we’re experiencing our winter already, there is a wave of respiratory illnesses affecting babies and children and we are only in august. Where I work surgery is being cancelled so that staff can be redeployed to the medical wards. Plus staff are off sick with stress, burn out, mental health, and isolating. Staff are being pulled from anywhere to help, it’s an uncertain and exhausting time and we potentially haven’t hit the worst of it. And that’s without Covid.

My neighbour is a pead dr. She says kids immune system are a bit shot. Because we’ve not been exposed to bugs like normal and colds are turning rapidly into respiratory illnesses. Sadly.

I'm an ODP. We aren't cancelling lists but we should be. Our department is massively understaffed at the moment. We still have loads of our permanent staff at our non-covid site because they were on the shielding list, and the ones who weren't are so burned out that they've gone off sick.
We aren't cancelling procedures willy nilly. If we ever cancel procedures it's because there are no staff and it wouldn't be safe.

I'm sorry to hear that your surgery has been cancelled so much. We usually do try and not cancel the ones who have been cancelled prior

I'd pay more tax to ensure an adequate system too. Try and make it only available below a certain income and I'll be paying plenty less.

I've been saying for years that it should be privatised

Please no private for profit model. Govt needs to fund it adequately. Budgets rose by 1.4 per cent each year on average (adjusting for inflation) in the 10 years between 2009/10 to 2018/19, compared to the 3.7 per cent average rises since the NHS was established.

Annual % increased a bit (around 3%) since 2018/19 but not enough to catch up by a long shot. France, Germany, Scandinavia all spend a larger % of GDP on healthcare than U.K. Plus our social care funding is dire and affects NHS budget too.

I appreciate the NHS wasn't in a great state pre-covid, but it just seems madness that a virus that is here to stay, that 87% of the adult population is inoculated against, is still going to grind the NHS to a halt this winter AGAIN

It's not just covid OP. My mum had an operation cancelled three times in a row in 2017 because of the bad flu outbreak. Once she was ready to go into theatre and it was called off at the last minute because they'd turned the orthopedic ward into a flu ward!

@Theworldisfullofgs

If we privatised or semi privatised we'd have to make sure we didn't end up like the States where you are only one bad illness away from bankruptc.

Personally, I think its the politicisation of healthcard that is the problem. It costs £££££££ to keep rearranging things with no obvious outcome other than enabling governments to de like they are doing something whilst being able to say 'it's too early to tell yet'.

See people say this sort of thing about America all the time on these threads, but it isn't a binary choice between US style healthcare where it's 100% free market privatised and if you don't have insurance you're screwed, or the NHS. Virtually every other country in the world, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, I could go on has some form of an in-between model where insurance is highly regulated and subsidized by the state and hospitals are either state run, privately run (but again, highly regulated) or a mix of both. So saying 'but look at the US!' is not an answer/rebuttal to those that think some degree of privatization is the way to go. I'm not necessarily one of those people BTW but I do think if we want to stick with the current model we are going to have to accept we either need to pay more or have lower quality - the way we are currently doing where we spend less per capita on healthcare than virtually anywhere else in the developed world but still expect first class service seems unsustainable.

And of course people on MN always say they'd be very happy to vote for higher taxes/better NHS but the election results for the last 20 years very much speak against that being the reality for the majority of Brits (anyone remember Teresa May's 'dementia tax' which last all of about 10 seconds as a suggestion before being met with disgust/rotten tomatoes/approval ratings plunge?), but maybe Covid will have changed that? I do think most people think it's someone else's problem though, most people think 'the rich' should pay more taxes (conveniently designating the 'rich' as never including themselves) or that 'businesses' should pay more, again forgetting that if businesses need to save money or go outside the UK then job losses will result and no-one wants that either. I don't think there are easy solutions certainly, it's really complex and difficult and certainly not as simple as 'the government should fund it better'...