To think the NHS isn’t fit for purpose?

[BrendaBubbles]

There’s a story on Mail Online right now about a woman with breathing difficulties who was left on hold for hours with her GP who died during the call. There have been a lot of stories recently about people with cancer that wasn’t picked up due to resource limits and a DH of a friend of mine has been told there is a six month waiting list for an MRI.

I know the people in the NHS are true gold but despite record amounts of money the service is getting worse. It was also in the news earlier that the number of people seen at A&E within four hours was 95% in 2010 and has fallen to 67% now and I’m sure we’ve all felt this when we’ve attended ourselves.

It’s clearly not just about money but is the NHS even fit for purpose now when people are dying through simple negligence and lack of reasonable diagnosis and in person access to GPs?

@FangsForTheMemory

The government has been defunding the NHS for a decade in order to get people like YOU to think it is not fit for purpose so that when they sell it off - which they are doing, bit by bit - there will be no outcry.

Every time I see a thread like this started, I assume the OP is a Tory shill. If you're not, don't play into their hands.

What @FangsForTheMemory said.

I presented in March of 2015, had orthopaedic surgery in 2017 that fell apart after eleven days and I still have not had revisionary surgery. I am disabled and haven't worked since January 2017.

The NHS is all smoke and mirrors unless it's something straightforward.

The nhs has been under funded for years and years.

What on earth do you expect to happen?

Have people not learnt the lessons from previous privatisation? Look at the state of the energy market for one (which has been on the brink for a long time).

We already pay for the NHS via taxes. I’d rather keep it that way and increase taxes. If you further introduce the profit motive, then you create perverse incentives as companies will chase the money at the expense of the patient.

Been told by our GPS that they are never returning to face to face appointments or open surgery. Everything will be done by telephone first. I understand that during the pandemic but this should not be the default.

@Stopsnowing

Been told by our GPS that they are never returning to face to face appointments or open surgery. Everything will be done by telephone first. I understand that during the pandemic but this should not be the default.

That approach has been on the card for a while now and was mooted per pandemic. Hell, it was even sold as a better way by private GP practices

And you think the Daily Mail as an authoritative news source !

The NHS is brilliant. It is dealing with a once in a century pandemic and is stretched to the maximum but it continues to deliver the services that we all rely on every day.

You'd need to be blind to not see that.

The NHS is currently definitely not brilliant. There are some amazing people working in the NHS at every level but there is also an awful culture of bullying and blame shifting, difficulty in removing incompetent /lazy staff. Staff can be on fully paid sick leave for months, come back to work for a week then be off on fully paid sick leave for months again, either not being replaced or being replaced by stupidly expensive agency staff (where it's the private agency getting paid £££££££).

The whole thing needs complete reform from the ground up. It shouldn't be seen as a sacred cow, but something we pay for and deserve value from. But we need to pay more for it.

People's expectations of what the NHS can provide need to change.

There should be more emphasis/education on prevention and a holistic approach to health starting with pregnancy and early years.

@FangsForTheMemory

The government has been defunding the NHS for a decade in order to get people like YOU to think it is not fit for purpose so that when they sell it off - which they are doing, bit by bit - there will be no outcry.

Every time I see a thread like this started, I assume the OP is a Tory shill. If you're not, don't play into their hands.

Couldn't agree more. It's terrifying. There simply isn't enough money or enough staff, but people will slowly think it's down to mismanagement. It clearly isn't - when the government put the money in for the vaccine roll out the NHS delivered.

@FangsForTheMemory

The government has been defunding the NHS for a decade in order to get people like YOU to think it is not fit for purpose so that when they sell it off - which they are doing, bit by bit - there will be no outcry.

Every time I see a thread like this started, I assume the OP is a Tory shill. If you're not, don't play into their hands.

This, you’re falling for the Tory plan to defund it entirely- if we all want a fit for purpose NHS it needs better funding.

I’d happily pay more in tax to support it, the Tories want to see if fail so they can privatise it, then it’ll cost us all more anyway.

If we pay for the nhs at the point of use, we won’t see a corresponding fall in taxes.

So let’s just up tax instead?

My dad was told three weeks ago he would need a (non emergency) blood transfusion. He got a call on Thursday fro his GP to say he had to drop everything and go to A&E and they would arrange it.
Three days into a new job, I had to take time off with no notice to get him there, and i said to him enroute that I had a bad feeling about it as A&E seemed a strange point of access to me.
We arrived and encountered the following staff as we made our way from the emergency door to a&e (about 3 metres apart)
1 nurse at the door ensuring we gelled our hands and wore a mask
1 nurse siting alongside her asking what we were there for
1 nurse in the lobby making sure we gelled and masked and checking if we were on a list of expected patients
If this had been a private company, all of this would have without doubt been covered by one member of staff.
Once inside, we had to join a queue to actually enter the a&e waiting room. My dad is 84 and has come in for a blood transfusion and found standing in the queue utterly exhausting.
After 10 minutes are so, we were finally allowed into A&E, where we had to go through the whole rigmarole again with another member of staff before we told the receptionist what we had already told prior staff.
How can anyone justify this waste? It is just not necessary.
I was not allowed to stay with my upset and confused dad because of covid, The couldn't tell me how long he would be and they would not commit to calling me when he was ready as they were too busy.
We were told to ring in two hours but could not get through as te phone was not answered. When we did get through after 4 hours, we were told to ring again in two hours and again could not get through.
He entered a&e at 11.30 and at 10pm I finally manged to speak to someone, and found out he was staying in overnight.
A of this time, my 84 year old mum was phoning me every 30 minutes to find out what was happening.
It was a very stressful day which could have been handled so much better with a little compassion, communication and consideration.
I am sick to death if all NHS staff being deified and frankly appalling behaviour being excused as they are 'too busy'
We are all busy and I can't think of any other situation where my dad's treatment woukd have been acceptable at all.
Yet I am donning my hard hat for te comments I am going to get for daring to criticise te NHS.

@FangsForTheMemory

The government has been defunding the NHS for a decade in order to get people like YOU to think it is not fit for purpose so that when they sell it off - which they are doing, bit by bit - there will be no outcry.

Every time I see a thread like this started, I assume the OP is a Tory shill. If you're not, don't play into their hands.

Everybody read this. Carefully. Multiple times. Spread the word. Down with Tories.

A lot of the GP practices in our area have been taken over by a private company.

They are aggressively pushing the covid vaccine as they get paid about £40 per patient that they jab. They are even sending vaccine buses to the local schools to target sixth formers.

Yet we can't get a GP appointment with them.

Katyppp, I took my Ddad for a pre-op appointment 4 or 5 years ago - there were four consultants doing appointments at the same session - each consultant had a nurse who was doing nothing but handing the consultant the patient's file. What a waste. Also noticed the same thing at an opthalmology appt - nurses sitting around between taking patient file to consultant.

Why on earth the consultant couldn't just have the patient files on his desk I have no idea.

I know there will be occasions when the doctor will need a nurse to actually do something other than hand over a file, but to have four doubtless experienced nurses sitting around doing bugger all for the best part of a four hour clinic seems ludicrous. Is it a throwback to when surgeons were followed around by swathes of minions and didn't have to open the door or pick up a pencil themselves?

As an NHS nurse I feel awful for patient's trying to access services and can see the mismanagement on a daily basis. I do get disheartened when I hear the way NHS staff are spoken about, most of us are trying our best. It has never been so bad, we are broken and damaged by what we have seen and done. Some staff have compassion fatigue and that is so sad but understandable to see.

What is the answer? In my personal opinion working under a labour NHS was far better than Tories. Yes labour made mistakes but the Tories has deliberately underfunded it.

It cannot go on in its current form it is crumbling. My colleagues have no more to give but we keep going. We should have minimum 8 staff for 26 patients but it's usually 5 as they keep moving staff. My ward is a happy ward and we have no vacancies however, this won't remain as staff are burnt out. When I am asked how I am supporting staff I am almost speechless, I am doing what I can but it is the external pressures I cannot change.

Every day we are told how many A&E attendances and breeches we have had, it is so depressing. I can do my bit by moving my patient's as quickly as possible through the system but not when we are working on dangerous staffing levels. We have complaints about not answering the bells quickly enough, these people are correct and it really upsets us, but 5 people cannot manage 26 patient's whilst ensuring staff get breaks, or we need to leave the ward to collect a patient from theatre.

Don't even get me started on weekends it's like a ghost town, same number of patient's less services so nurses have to act as physio's, phlebotomists, and pharmacy porters. Due to staffing junior newly qualified or locum doctors are on all weekend who need support so we do that to.

Best pay in the NHS is Sundays we can't even cover those now. No incentive to work extra as, overtime does not exist. You agree to come in on a day off to help your department on no extra pay and then get moved.

The NHS has a huge amount of underlying issues that most choose to ignore.
Sorry for my rant.

Katyppp it does sound like you had a very stressful day, however you would have to work in A and E to understand it from the other side.

Im over 60. I’ve been around since the days when all doctors could do for a Patient after a heart attack was give them aspirin, oxygen and monitor them for a few weeks and send them home if they improved. Now there are clot busting drugs, angiograms, stenting, bypass ops, physio, dietician and OT Input. There are MRI and echo cardiagrams and other tests that are time consuming and expensive to carry out.

This is the case for so many conditions that there used to be few options for when it comes to treatment. We can operate on people before they are born and we operate on 85 year olds with broken hips. Expectations are high because there is so much more that can be done for nearly every common condition now. Without raising taxes the NHS can’t offer what is expected of it. And all the money in the world can’t suddenly address the shortage of doctors and nurses. In out trust the top guy for upper limb transplants has retired. The paediatric anaesthetist who does complex surgery ( the 10 hour+ ops on tiny babies etc) has retired. The paediatric surgeon who he worked with doing the complex ops has retired and there is nobody with anything like their experience and knowledge to take any of their places as yet. All 3 have extended their retirements for the maximum amount of time allowed but they’ve had to stop now. It’s a worry.

We are living longer and needing far more medical attention for longer. And the expertise and hardware is there to extend our lives for longer. There are so many issues to address from top to bottom in the NHS if it is to be adequate though and it feels like Theres no joined up strategy to begin to get a handle on everything that would be needed to get it more functional.

People have such short memories when it comes to other political parties especially when the current one is shite, others seem to have a halo over them.

The NHS was ruined by Labour by turning it into a business model. Labour cut the beds so there were no excess and all wards had to be working at 95% capacity at all times meaning very little give during pressure points of the year. They also introduced all the pointless business managers which meant while there was more money 'in' the NHS, lots were diverted to business managers and not on the front line.

Labour create paper shuffling jobs and the money is still kept from where it is needed. I agree that Tories have continued on the path of ruining it, it did begin with Labour. We want neither near the NHS if we want to keep it. There is no one worth their weight to vote for who would improve the NHS. Labour will ruin it, Tories will ruin it.

@stairway. I do appreciate that, honestly. But how can this, waste and lack of compassion be justified? Why were four nurses being used in unnecessary roles? Why was everybody 'too busy' to let te family know what the hell was going on? I am busy, we're all busy. Can you think of Any other situation where it woukd be acceptable to be too busy to make a phone call? I can't

I don’t want a different system. By any data it was far better fifteen years ago so let’s start by merely getting back to that. What would that take? Maybe some more funding but I think mostly intelligent management and focus.

Oh and at those of you laughing that you don’t believe that poor woman died because it was on Mail shame on you. Google her name Helena Maffei .. it is in many papers including her local one.

It’s the people in charge of finances and management that are fucking up the NHS. They prefer to stick with ridiculously expensive contracts instead of sourcing lower cost alternatives. We shouldn’t have to pay more tax when the management won’t change! They’ll just been even more frivolous with tax payer money.

I am getting suspicious now. There is a new one of these threads every few days once a similar one has fallen of the front page of AIBU. @FangsForTheMemory is very tight and I am so sad to see so many people falling for the Tory’s plan to make it so terrible that people will sit silently as it is privatised.

The Tory’s and their friends only care about money so we are not going to get a European system instead or an Australian one or even a Canadian one, we will get an American one and if we get that then people will have wished so badly that they did not complain about the NHS at that point.

I am not someone who believes the NHS is perfect or that people cannot criticise it but I’m getting really suspicious about the motivations of some of the posters of these threads now.

[quote Katyppp]@stairway. I do appreciate that, honestly. But how can this, waste and lack of compassion be justified? Why were four nurses being used in unnecessary roles? Why was everybody 'too busy' to let te family know what the hell was going on? I am busy, we're all busy. Can you think of Any other situation where it woukd be acceptable to be too busy to make a phone call? I can't[/quote]
How do you know they were nurses?

Because they had name badges and job titles on them. Next question?