Shocked at how terrible the NHS is nowadays

[ConfusedBoobs]

I had a mammogram a month ago that showed I have calcifications that they don't think are cancer but they won't know for sure until after I've had a biopsy. Today I found out that the biopsy can't be prioritised as urgent and so will still be another month away. AIBU to think it's terrible to leave people in limbo like this?

@lgfdyjxzyjkv nope, Medicare spending is less per capita (9.3% in 2018, latest figures I could find). UK has spent between 9.6-10.3% of GDP over the past three years. But Australians also usually have top up health insurance (average cost $2000 per year), and will go private for most hospital visits. So overall funding per patient is significantly higher than that. And things like physio, OT, speech therapy etc aren’t included.

Look at what has happened with dentistry. You pay a small charge for all NHS treatment and those on very low incomes get it free. In practice the government reduced NHS payments so that lots only offer private dentistry. Most dentists my way operate an insurance scheme, presumably the only way they can get people to pay private prices.

So we have lots of people who only go to the dentist for emergency treatment. They have teeth pulled out in pain and some people are reported to have done their own tooth extraction at home to save money. We have middle-class people getting better dentistry than under the old scheme with cosmetic procedures routine. But the gap between the poorest peoples teeth and rich peoples teeth is a mile wide. It would be even worse without fluoride in tap water.

This is what would happen with a medical insurance scheme. We can see what has already happened with dentistry in England. It is a national disgrace.

The first post urged the OP to go privately if they could. What's the point of the NHS when people are having to pay privately anyway?

Honestly, I think a lot of people are having to do this (my dad did for suspected heart failure 2 months ago) The more people who do this, or know people who have had to just to access healthcare, the more who will see the NHS as a massive waste of public funds.

I'm currently waiting for a NHS paediatrician appointment for my 4 month old. Luckily I have private health care from my DH work so got a private consultation with a paediatrician booked for next week (one week after I asked my private provider for a referral) God knows when I would have got a NHS appointment.

It's a joke. I had a free whole day screen the other day here for breast cancer awareness month including half an hour with a consultant and a routine CA125 as well as the scans and xray. Meanwhile, I am posting my mum thyroxine to the UK because she has a 6 week wait to talk to anyone, even their dippy nurse, who by the way, is one of the most unkind people in the world. How is that OK, ffs its 20p a box here.

The NHS has not been 'thrown under a bus', it has had millions upon millions hurled at it but been very very poorly mismanaged.

Very sorry for you OP. This is a terrible thing for you to have to go through.

No the NHS is chronically underfunded. Canada spends four times per person than we do on healthcare.

[quote Changechangychange]@lgfdyjxzyjkv nope, Medicare spending is less per capita (9.3% in 2018, latest figures I could find). UK has spent between 9.6-10.3% of GDP over the past three years. But Australians also usually have top up health insurance (average cost $2000 per year), and will go private for most hospital visits. So overall funding per patient is significantly higher than that. And things like physio, OT, speech therapy etc aren’t included.[/quote]
Maybe - but the overall system is so much better than the NHS and there a fewer issues for poorer people to access health care. Surely that has to be the objective, to protect the more vulnerable. Having safe and affordable for all healthcare simply isn’t an issue in Australia, it is taken as a given of a civilised society. Whereas here we are constantly trying to tie ourselves in knots to justify a system that outdated and inefficient.

@Draggondragon

It's a joke. I had a free whole day screen the other day here for breast cancer awareness month including half an hour with a consultant and a routine CA125 as well as the scans and xray. Meanwhile, I am posting my mum thyroxine to the UK because she has a 6 week wait to talk to anyone, even their dippy nurse, who by the way, is one of the most unkind people in the world. How is that OK, ffs its 20p a box here.

No one should be taking thyroxine without a diagnosis. It is potentially dangerous.

It has been deliberately run into the ground. Morale is on the floor. It's all you can do to find enough nurses and carers to actually staff a ward as so many have quit patient care (who can blame them) and moved to "initiatives" like the fucking "transformation team"
Brilliant idea.
The huge general hospital near me has gone from 140 beds to 28 in 5 years. But community teams now have access to 8 beds in a nursing home to "prevent admission" so it's not all bad eh!

@julieca

Look at what has happened with dentistry. You pay a small charge for all NHS treatment and those on very low incomes get it free. In practice the government reduced NHS payments so that lots only offer private dentistry. Most dentists my way operate an insurance scheme, presumably the only way they can get people to pay private prices.

So we have lots of people who only go to the dentist for emergency treatment. They have teeth pulled out in pain and some people are reported to have done their own tooth extraction at home to save money. We have middle-class people getting better dentistry than under the old scheme with cosmetic procedures routine. But the gap between the poorest peoples teeth and rich peoples teeth is a mile wide. It would be even worse without fluoride in tap water.

This is what would happen with a medical insurance scheme. We can see what has already happened with dentistry in England. It is a national disgrace.

Honestly if people cannot afford NHS dentistry (and it is free for those on benefits) they need to look at their finances. It’s not as if it happens every week!
www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/dentists/dental-costs/how-much-will-i-pay-for-nhs-dental-treatment/

@Igfdyjxzyjkv You said Australia had a better system and spend less on it. They don’t, they have a better system and spend more on it.

You said the NHS should be as good as private healthcare models, and yet cost less than it costs now, because people are sick of spending money on it. That is not physically possible - good healthcare is expensive.

The options are:

Better, more expensive system (whatever funding structure is used)

Status quo

Worse, cheaper system (which is what we seem to be moving towards)

Or the US system, which I think most people are clear we don’t want. We do need to ensure that isn’t brought in by stealth though - the issues with procurement contracts during the pandemic demonstrated that we have an entirely corrupt system of awarding contracts to politicians friends and donors.

To those saying “all part of the Tory plan”, that’s not the answer to the OP’s question and doesn’t make the NHS miraculously NOT shit.

Which it unquestionably is, for most routine stuff. Agree with PP; paying in tax for a service that literally doesn’t work.

It's OK Dr Spock. OBVIOUSLY I am not stupid and she has been taking it for 20 years, she just can't break through the third world syst to get a repeat. And if you are such a medic, you are probably aware of the dangers of stopping it overnight, far more dangerous.

The issue with dentistry is access, not ability to pay. If there are no NHS dentists in your local area (because they have been driven out by underfunding), it doesn’t matter if it is free or not, people can’t access it. As I am sure you know.

@Igfdyjxzyjkv yep blame people for not paying for the dentist. It will be the same when people have to pay for medical care.
Well its your own fault you didn't pay to go to the GP when you got blood in your poo. Not our fault you now have terminal cancer.
I can see the MN threads now.
If only they stopped paying for Netflix and Sky they could afford to go to the GP.

@Changechangychange there are dentists in my area. They all run private insurance schemes. Exactly what is being suggested here for healthcare.
And there is an overall shortage of dentists just as there is an overall shortage of medics. Ability to pay is simply another way to ration access.

@Igfdyjxzyjkv it's impossible to find a NHS dentist as most are no longer accepting NHS patients.i called up 10 different dentists. I just paid £2k for dental treatment. Thankfully I can afford it. A lot of people can't

[quote Changechangychange]@Igfdyjxzyjkv You said Australia had a better system and spend less on it. They don’t, they have a better system and spend more on it.

You said the NHS should be as good as private healthcare models, and yet cost less than it costs now, because people are sick of spending money on it. That is not physically possible - good healthcare is expensive.

The options are:

Better, more expensive system (whatever funding structure is used)

Status quo

Worse, cheaper system (which is what we seem to be moving towards)

Or the US system, which I think most people are clear we don’t want. We do need to ensure that isn’t brought in by stealth though - the issues with procurement contracts during the pandemic demonstrated that we have an entirely corrupt system of awarding contracts to politicians friends and donors.[/quote]
Ok - what we need is a BETTER system that is more efficient and makes sure that the vulnerable are not prevented from accessing health care because of their means. I don’t care how it is done but mindless defence of the current system is not going to get us there. In other systems that are hybrid public and private you can access primary care and get diagnostics, operations etc in reasonable clinical timeframes. Here we are expected to develop serious illness before the system reacts.

[quote Changechangychange]@Igfdyjxzyjkv You said Australia had a better system and spend less on it. They don’t, they have a better system and spend more on it.

You said the NHS should be as good as private healthcare models, and yet cost less than it costs now, because people are sick of spending money on it. That is not physically possible - good healthcare is expensive.

The options are:

Better, more expensive system (whatever funding structure is used)

Status quo

Worse, cheaper system (which is what we seem to be moving towards)

Or the US system, which I think most people are clear we don’t want. We do need to ensure that isn’t brought in by stealth though - the issues with procurement contracts during the pandemic demonstrated that we have an entirely corrupt system of awarding contracts to politicians friends and donors.[/quote]
Yes all the better systems cost more.
Good healthcare costs. We are being sold a lie that we can have private insurance schemes and they wont cost more than now. Of course they will cost more. And there will be more bureaucracy and managers. It takes staff to sell and collect insurance payments and collect co pays and chase people for debts through courts.

@Igfdyjxzyjkv The two issues with the NHS are:

1. Underfunding - it needs more money. For example women who have given birth should be in private rooms.
2. More staff, there is a shortage of qualified medics. The only way to solve this is in the short term immigration and in long term planning and incentives for people to train in areas of shortage.

Anything else wont work. If we don't increase the number of qualified staff, we simply ration healthcare in another way. Probably through ability to pay.

Plus letting covid run through the population is putting strain on the NHS. We have nearly 9,000 people with covid in hospitals taking beds that in normal times would have been used by other patients.

Ok - what we need is a BETTER system that is more efficient and makes sure that the vulnerable are not prevented from accessing health care because of their means. I don’t care how it is done but mindless defence of the current system is not going to get us there. In other systems that are hybrid public and private you can access primary care and get diagnostics, operations etc in reasonable clinical timeframes

And that costs more! Four times as much in the Canadian system, up to double in European countries and Australia. Which you say is unacceptable to you. You can’t have it both ways. Good, or dirt cheap, pick one.

Oh I do know it's not the NHS fault at all but it's the Government who has underfunded the NHS for years.

The Consultant had given me a M3 Mammogram grade which comes with about a 40% risk of cancer. I'm really unhappy that I'm left to wait when it seems so high. I understand it can't be as highly prioritised as someone with a higher risk of cancer though.

I am sorry that others have experienced such a difficult time with the NHS. I think it's such a postcode lottery and we really we need to think again about how we do things. Or what governments we elect.

The NHS needs a complete rethink and overhaul. Following the NHS Act of 1946, and when the NHS actually came into being in 1948, things were very different to what they are now.

In 1948 penicillin was a new drug. Internal investigations were a few blood tests or an x-ray, and if you were staying in hospital you had an iron framed bed and a locker. Monitoring was taking your temperature twice a day. Because there was so relatively little on offer, hospitals were smaller and more manageable. The UK population in 1950 was 50m.

Compare that to now, when we have so many more drugs, operations, investigations, and a population of 68m. Anyone who watches hospital documentaries, or Holby, knows how much more there is to healthcare in 2021.

So for the NHS to function as we want it to, we need to go back to its first principles. If we want to have a service that provides the treatment people need, in an appropriate time frame and free at the point of delivery, and in the context of the care that is possible in the 21st century, then rather than giving it a few extra billion here and there it has to be redesigned from the ground up. And then we need to see what the cost of that service would be, and whether it is even within the bounds of possibility that it could be funded by taxation. And if not, then alternatives have to be considered.

The problem for the NHS today is that like Topsy it has growed and growed - " something that grew or increased by itself, without apparent design or intention" - and its original design may not be feasible for present circumstances.

@Feedingthebirds1 yes the Tories said the exact same under Thatcher. Then when Labour got in suddenly the NHS got a lot better and the amount of people buying private health insurance plummeted.
It is the same old Tory laws. It needs reform to allow us to give our rich friends more money.