Do you have faith in the NHS after covid?

[Plumface]

Given that patients were discharged to nursing homes, and other patients not admitted despite hospitals not being full, also that GPs and dentists seemed to close down, but PR/marketing story professionals still got paid, are you still happy to entrust your care to the NHS?

YABU = I trust the NHS and it's great
YANBU = I don't trust the NHS

I'm so sorry to hear this @AutomaticMoon.
We have had a mixed experience in our family too (The HDU department my 2 month old dd was admitted to were amazing) but lots of disinterest and few instances of poor prescribing as well. I'm really interested in your chat with @Herani about CBT. I know someone currently being treated with CBT for anxiety and ptsd. It's not working brilliantly for them at all. I do find there is a really loud advocacy for and adherence to CBT to the detriment of all other therapies.

@mummykel16

It's mates rates in reverse. Needs to be a massive investigation into who gets what contracts and why, trouble is any time the waste is mentioned you get cries of "but it's only duhduhduh percentage of the overall budget" which is only ever said as a percentage when it makes costs look less, an example of this would be some trusts paying over £6 a pack for A4 paper, which at the time was £2 in Asda, makes zero sense the NHS purchasing power is immense

I agree during covid it was outrageous under the guise of being operationally urgent so processes could be circumvented. Things could be done better, but you can view contracts over a certain value online due to transparency laws. It's also not too hard to find the ordering system they use for paper etc, and it's not expensive. There are many issues and it needs a complete rehaul, but there's always a lot of hyperbole about what people assume is the case regarding spending or what they read in the papers; forgetting the rest of the work people do to follow the relevant procurement laws.

And the NHS really leverages its bargaining power well when it comes to pharmaceuticals and meds. Look at the prices of insulin in the UK vs the US.

I no longer trust GPs. Who would have guessed that being a GP would be the safest job in a pandemic?
They used covid as an excuse to effectively ban people from their surgeries and do as little as possible face to face consultation no doubt many illnesses have been misdiagnosed. I despair of GPs. I accept that there are a few exceptions but too few.

Some hospital teams used covid to their advantage and stopped working.

Many worked really hard and saved lives. These ones are heros and carried on when they were at risk themselves.

Over all the NHS is a beauracratic badly run organisation.

Not all GPs hid away, our surgery was amazing throughout. Also although they are contracted by the NHS to deliver services, doctors surgeries aren't technically NHS in the way hospitals etc are.

I fell out with the NHS long before Covid, I had a very bad experience having ds 18 years ago & haven't trusted them since. Anything I have neededI have had through NHS choose & book at my local private hospital.

Casting the issue in the guise of "faith" is exactly the problem. We're not on this earth to pray to the great god NHS. It is a health service; it should reasonably support the population it was set up to serve an if it can't we collectively should find an alternative. It is not my job as an ordinary member of the public to "save the NHS" and yet we're so far down the track that somehow politicians spout statements like "save/protect the NHS" and we all nod along like Churchill.

Resounding yes from me.

Regular screening continued here, regardless of covid, I was found to have bc last year, treatment has met all the time scales, and care has been exemplary.

In fact I probably trust them more, because they've coped so well.

I didn’t trust the nhs before Covid

For myself and those that I know in the area who are registered with the local doctors surgery, we all agree that Covid is just a convenient excuse on why they are so shit

It has taken them 2.5 months to even acknowledge they need to give me a repeat prescription. My medication which has to be taken daily ran out 8 days ago. I now, because I have been without meds for over a week have to go back to the beginning and take lesser medication to work my way up to my usual meds which means I have to go back to a different clinic which is going to take months to get myself back to where I was 8 days ago.
Last week I spent 4 hours on the phone just on one day trying to get my prescription and trying to find out why I don’t have an appointment at a hospital for something that was supposedly booked in November but they won’t tell when it is.

No amount of money thrown at the nhs will fix these things.

The wastage is unbelievable and the more money you throw at it, the more money they have to waste.

Interesting question. If I trusted the NHS explicitly to do everything I need it to then I wouldn’t have private health insurance. That said, do I trust the individual clinicians I deal with? Pretty much, I have some great GPs at my surgery, I saw some great HCPs at a&e yesterday with my child. I have friends and neighbours who are medics and appear to be pretty great, competent people. But some of them are very clearly burnt out.

A&E yesterday was full of time wasters. People with ‘unwell’ children charging up and down the hallway (my own child barely moved from his bed the whole time). A teenager who almost certainly had indigestion and possibly warranted a primary care appointment, but almost certainly didn’t need to be rushed to a&e. The staff were treating every single one of them with utmost patience and respect, I take my hat off to them.

Primary care is utterly broken though. We had our first face to face interaction with a GP since the start of the pandemic this week. And whilst the quality of the telemedicine we have received is good, some of it has been risky (antibiotic prescription over the phone, without seeing the patient has been common). I have huge issue with GP surgeries operating as what are essentially small businesses with ‘sales targets’ and quotas for various interventions.

The NHS as a system is buckling under mismanagement and pressure. As a public sector employee it’s something I really recognise about my own organisation - bits of it are fundamentally broken yet people carry on as best they can.

Primarily I think acute medicine works fairly well, but covid has meant that primary care access is so hard so a number of patients end up at emergency centres without needing to be there, either by being missed in primary care and becoming and emergency or simply having nowhere else to go. The social care aspect of the NHS has been broken for so long now that I’m not sure it’s fixable.

Didn’t trust the nhs PRE-covid, but then am in the privileged position of having lived in and experienced healthcare systems out with the UK. IME only those who’ve never experienced differently truly believe the 2012 Olympics guff.

I think the NHS and its staff have performed magnificently.
The Government, not so much. Even the vaccine programme roll out has far more to do with the NHS than Government, despite the fact that Government crows endlessly about it.

@ItsCanardBruv

Some of us may have lived outside the UK and experienced far worse healthcare systems...

Can't vote on the app but YABU. My GP surgery is great. Can get appointments really quickly and they offered face to face appointments all through Covid if needed. I live in an area where the local hospitals are rated outstanding and any time I've had to use them I've been seen quickly and my treatment has been excellent. I know some people have had problems during Covid and there are issues with staffing and money wasting but overall thousands of people are successfully treated every day by the NHS. There were mistakes made during Covid yes but I'm looking at the NHS overall, and I'm grateful for it.

Sorry to say but no I don’t.

There is just not enough staff to deliver the care.

Because there is not enough staff the staff that are there are exhausted, overwhelmed and poorly educated because there’s not enough staff to release them for training.
Training which is fundamental to patient safety.

They have no support and just go through the motions then leave.
No fault of their own.

I would not wish to be in a hospital, I would not want any of my family to be in a hospital.

My GP, brilliant service though, completely disagree with the pp stating that GPs have dodged work, I know ours have worked their arses off.

@Plumface

I'm directing the question at Mumsnet.

Interesting point though re HCPs. Just whose responsibility is it when a patient is denied treatment?

Why don't you just give the whole story rather than trying to get MN to agree that individuals shouldn't be making decisions. Clearly many factors are considered when deciding to admit someone or not; such decisions may have been affected by the consequences of covid on nhs resources and staffing, but yes, sometimes pts are sent home and later become v ill. But the reality is, the NHS was costing too much money 2 years after it was launched, hence the Labour govt introducing dental and prescription charges on 1950. It's a victim of its own sucess

[quote AutomaticMoon]@SweetPeaGirl Same, they’ve left me with a chronic UTI since age 29 (now 39) claiming it’s incurable Interstitial Cystitis when I actually needed long term antibiotics (Dr. Malone-Lee protocol) 😞[/quote]
You stirred a memory @sweetpeagirl! I worked with Dr Malone-Lee decades ago! Sadly, he is very ill - a non curable cancer.

@ufucoffee

Can't vote on the app but YABU. My GP surgery is great. Can get appointments really quickly and they offered face to face appointments all through Covid if needed. I live in an area where the local hospitals are rated outstanding and any time I've had to use them I've been seen quickly and my treatment has been excellent. I know some people have had problems during Covid and there are issues with staffing and money wasting but overall thousands of people are successfully treated every day by the NHS. There were mistakes made during Covid yes but I'm looking at the NHS overall, and I'm grateful for it.

Lucky you. It really is a postcode lottery.

Yes, we've had shoulder operations, good GP service, HRT clinic. All good service during covid.
My worries for the NHS and where it's being 'taken' is a different worrying issue.

I work in the nhs and see the strain it comes under everyday. I trust it. There will be some poor staff - everywhere has them.

The chronic underfunding over the last decade combined with covid has run it into the ground.

I do not trust the current government. They have provided time and time again they are dishonest and self serving. I'm beyond frustrated people keep voting the Tories back in.

If you think the government radically reforming the NHS will go well- look at the PPE scandal. It needs to to a multiparty depoliticalised reform.

I haven't trusted them even before covid. They need a comprehensive independent review before any further investments. People need to stop glorification of NHS and look at multiple inefficiencies, very management heavy structure and wasted resources.

No. I've had too many problems and most recently had to cry down the phone just to be able to see a doctor face to face which was humiliating but if I didn't beg I wouldn't be seen. I wish so much politicians would wake up and try a more different system, this system only works for the few and not the many.

Maybe if consultants working for the NHS didn't also work privately they'd be more capacity for us all? This false dichotomy between public and private in healthcare is absurd.

It's not the nhs though is it? It's the government who have been making cuts for years prior to the pandemic.

I've dealt with the health care system in other European countries and I can tell you, we are extremely, extremely lucky to have the nhs. It's the best thing about the UK.

Everyone complaining about their GP, they are private partnerships under contract to the NHS. What is perhaps wrong is the middle of employment type and contract types used. I'd really hate to lose democratic accountability for healthcare the way we have for academy schools, whereby a school can be a tatty down at heel place whilst the executive head is on six figures. I really do not want any model that introduces private insurance as another parasite sucking money out of the process.