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

DH lost his sight in one eye during the first lockdown because the doctors at the specialist eye clinic in our local hospital didn’t recognise the fact he had a rare parasite living in his eye. He’d told them it started after he went swimming wearing contact lenses, this parasite lives in water. It was pretty obvious from his symptoms (he couldn’t be in the light at all and couldn’t even open his eye, he was in crippling agony all of the time). They were specialists and they didn’t pick up on that so now he’s 28 and blind in one eye. Great. They kept fobbing him off thinking it was conjunctivitis to begin with followed by herpes. It wasn’t picked up for about 6 weeks of constant trips back and forth to hospital. Such a stressful time, he was in agony.

Lost a lot of trust in them after that. I lost a lot of trust in them when I was in hospital having a miscarriage and it was clear I was haemorrhaging (the room was absolutely filled with blood, it looked like a murder scene) but they didn’t believe me until I lost consciousness.

@Plumface

I'm directing the question at Mumsnet.

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

Don't you fucking dare to try and shift the focus or blame for the struggle the NHS faces onto its clinical staff. The "failures" are due to inadequate funding from government.

I didn't trust the NHS before covid based on my experiences and those of friends and family. It's really gone to shit now though IMO although many individuals within it are absolutely fantastic. The centralisation of services (which was only ever to save money) proved a very, very poor choice once covid hit. Very poor management, huge wasting of money, no long term or joined up thinking, no consideration of individual circumstances, hugely understaffed so staff become disillusioned and disengaged. It's all a big mess unfortunately and this government has no interest in making it better.

@11stonesomething

My father has just spent 11 days in. It was a poor experience for him and relatives overall. And the system doesnt work when a patient is too sick to advocate for themselves but families are not Allowed in or to speak to staff. If the patient doesnt have a mobile phone or is too sick to use it you are snookered.

Poor gp response and disinterest to original
Complaint.
First trip to a and e sent away with a flea in ear despite being unable to wash or dress in a dramatic rapid deterioration
Gp was not seeing patients and didnt return dads calls for 48 hours
111 6 hour call back sent a crew. They looked at him vomiting dark green and bed bound and said he needed some physio.
Following morning was found in a coma and rushed in on blue flashing lights
Care whilst in was good-getting him in was the issue
No contact from the hospital at all. Takes 45-60 mins to get through. Staff dont seem to know him or his general condition. Cant answer it he had his treatment or if they have seen doctor. Staff wont give their name. Different person every time you call.

Discharged yesterday with no phonecall from anyone except him saying come and get me. No discharge notes. No idea what happened for last 11 days. No medications? No advice on how to care for him now? We are on our own and terrified.

I think covid has deffo exacerbated the issues and staff are so stretched and fraught there is no room for compassion or families or aftercare.

We had a very similar experience with my FIL pre covid tbf. We couldn't be there very often as live 100 miles away. It was so hard to speak to anyone, there was never the same person twice, no one ever seemed to know what was going on, he attacked staff (due to his condition affecting his brain) and we didn't find out till weeks later.

My friends dad was sent home by GP several times as was my gran - she died a few days later due to acute diverticulosis (can't spell) and he was later diagnosed with cancer and died as it was too late to do anything.

Another NHS bashing thread!

Just what we needed to get the week off to a flying start 🙄

@MontagueLeo

Another NHS bashing thread!

Just what we needed to get the week off to a flying start 🙄

Some of the people commenting work in the NHS and are giving their direct experience. It’s pretty much an accepted fact that the NHS needs huge reform if it’s to continue. Would you rather we just pretended everything is fine? Because it is really not. And I’m really grateful for the people who dare to say that chucking endless amounts of money at it is not the answer because that’s been the narrative up till now.

They saved my life 6 weeks ago and are taking wonderful care of the last bits of my illness, but the system is run on a shoestring. I agree with everyone who distinguishes between NHS clinicians and government treatment of the NHS. I trust the NHS a lot more than the profit-driven system in the US (where I normally live.)

Any service from the NHS is better than no NHS at all

I don't have faith in the NHS, sadly. Many of the staff working in it are excellent and go above and beyond but the bureaucracy, form filling and huge amounts of waste are just awful. Personally I've had both very good and very, very bad experiences with the NHS in the last year. My overriding feeling is that it's not cohesive in any way and that the level of care that you get is purely dependent on which person you get to see on any given day.

[quote Plumface]@EmmaH2022 God that's awful. Like your mum's friends, the hospital my now dead family member was trying to get into wasn't full, not at all. His mum turned inside out trying to rationalize it.

I also had a friend around that time who suddenly put out a message on fucking Facebook of all things, asking if any of us knew where a defibrillator was because he'd phoned an ambulance for his flatmate and the operator said he couldn't have one but told him to get to a defibrillator. We were all on there saying dude, I have no fucking idea where one is, but if she's that bad (she was, as it goes), just ring a fucking taxi and take her in yourself, so he did. I remember it all, all happening in real time, on my frigging Facebook, it was mental.[/quote]
It was really fucking awful.

I don't want to say too much about someone else's business. The lady who drove her mum round the hospitals, she works for the NHS - or she did, she's left now.

So she knows full well there was room, beds, staff at the hospital she worked at! But she also knows it isn't worth complaining. Plus even if it was, she's been through so much.

The other friend of mum's has lasting damage that he might have been spared if he had treatment.

I must admit, I think expectations of the NHS are too high.

But when they won't provide emergency treatment for people, something is afoot. And what it is is that basic care is not top of their agenda.

I remember 20 odd years ago hearing that there's four times more staff at the senior managers weekly meeting than there are staff allocated to A&E in my local hospital.

I won't go into all the stories from when my dad was dying.

There are decent staff within the NHS and there are political aims interfering with their daily work in much the same way as other large organisations.

@whysoserious123

Any service from the NHS is better than no NHS at all

Actually I am not sure this is true. I don't want to sink money into this.

I have absolute faith in the wonderful staff working for the NHS, without them I wouldn't have my little boy.

I have no trust in the NHS to provide appropriate care. I appreciate the vast majority of issues are due to government funding but that is the result.

No but I didn't have faith in them before either. Whole thing need dismantling.

@Phos

No but I didn't have faith in them before either. Whole thing need dismantling.

Can you afford completely private care?

@Phos

No but I didn't have faith in them before either. Whole thing need dismantling.

Yes. You could slice off whole sections of management and service users would never know.

My previous GP, now retired, used to say that there was literally a parallel universe of bureaucracy making her job insanely hard.

This is a bit outing but I left a temp job in the Dept of Health. Yes, I got work easily elsewhere.

It was basically a team of consultants devising a new set of systems for nurses to report their work "goals". It was too awful. I don't usually let morals get in the way of money. But I couldn't stomach that.

No, we question and research anything and everything.

The NHS failed my father twice in 2005 and again in 2009, with poor diagnosis, botched treatment, etc which eventually led to his death at only 67. Both times, the misdiagnoses were blindingly obvious with hindsight, the first being a blocked bowel, where literally all the symptoms led to it being a blocked bowel, but because nothing showed up on scans/x-rays, they ignored the blindingly obvious and he got more and more poorly as they basically just sat back and waited, giving completely the wrong "treatment" until a different doctor decided to operate anyway, found the blockage and repaired it, but that was weeks later and he had deteriorated massively. Second time was cancer which wasn't diagnosed soon enough (blindingly obvious symptoms again) and then operations were repeatedly cancelled until it was too late to operate!

My OH had various different symptoms getter more and more serious as years passed, but the GPs never took it seriously, including not being remotely bothered about him passing out, getting broken ribs without any reason, severe bruising from even the slightest of knocks, etc. It took a locum GP to get a special blood test which showed a blood cell cancer that was very well developed and at dangerous levels. Treatment started fine, but then the oncology dept seemed to get bored as he got fewer and fewer consultations re progress, treatment appointments kept getting missed, meaning OH had to start pestering the dept to arrange treatments, appointments etc which seemed to be falling through the cracks. If he wasn't on top of his treatment, we genuinely think he'd have been literally forgotten (and in fact he was during covid as the dept moved to a different hospital but no one told OH and his phone calls to them just kept going to answerphone where messages were never acted upon - it was only when he physically went to the dept to speak to reception and found it had changed and was now an orthopoedic dept that they told him where oncology had moved to and the new phone numbers, etc. Then, occasionally, they issue the wrong doses of his regular drugs for no obvious reason - he has to check them and query and then has to get replacements, maybe 3/4 times a year - these are potentially dangerous drugs (chemo etc) so taking the wrong dose isn't good!

You really, really, have to have your wits about you and query things, chase things, etc. I really worry about the elderly/confused with no one to help them.

I have faith in the NHS - we are very lucky to have it. But I don't have faith in the bastard government who has decimated it. Anyone who uses the NHS and votes Tory is a fool.

@Itsnotover

I have faith in the NHS - we are very lucky to have it. But I don't have faith in the bastard government who has decimated it. Anyone who uses the NHS and votes Tory is a fool.

I'm so sick of posters saying this.

The worst stuff my parents experienced was under Labour, if Blair falls under Labour.

It's not relevant to the fundamental problem of throwing money at the NHS to fund people's corporate ambition.

How many of these events will have a positive end result for patients?

www.nhsconfed.org/events

I think the problem is that the service is so patchy and whether you get a good service or not is often a bit of a lottery.

I have found our GP surgery to be very good both pre and post covid. I have been able to get face to face appointments for myself and DD and the care they provided when DP had terminal cancer was excellent.

DD's hospital consultant on the other hand is a different story. DD is supposed to have an annual check-up as she has a serious ongoing neurological condition. It will soon be three years since we have seen the consultant. I was supposed to have a telephone consultation with her last week. I waited all afternoon and did not get a call. When I phoned to query this I was told I was not on the list. I found this rather strange as I had a letter in front of me confirming the appointment.

For some reason the consultant cannot carry out face to face consultations but yet another consultant in a different hospital was able to see DD about a different aspect of her health problems.

From what I can see the organisation is poor and, as with many large public organisations, is often more concerned with the bureaucracy side than actually delivering care.

I think the problem is that the NHS now has so many more calls on its' resources and an ageing and more demanding population. The bureaucracy and box ticking/target culture is slowly strangling it and anyone who tries to open a dialogue about what can be done is seen as attacking the NHS and wanting American style health care.

I am sure that many HCPs working in the NHS feel the same way but no-one (either on the right or left) is prepared to grasp the nettle and try to establish an efficient 21st century health care provider.

The NHS has many flaws and being under so much pressure the last couple of years the cracks are really showing.

Thankfully we have been very lucky with the quality of emergency care family members have received but a lot of routine things have been delayed.

@Stripyhoglets1

The thing is there may well be better systems elsewhere eg. France or Germany. But you can absolutely bet the only system the tories will be wanting to bring in will be the US insurance only based system. Where you seem.to pay a fortune for insurance but still have to pay.msssive co-pays as well!

This narrow thinking is exactly why we get stuck with the same struggling system. The Tories can't change anything because if they do, the people who hate the Tories whinge on about privatisation without even taking on board what is being suggested. Meanwhile Labour, who wants to make changes, can't change anything because it's their sacred cow and the central plank of each of their election campaigns. And so we carry on ploughing money into a system that produces tremendous results for many but is still failing a lot of people.

The only way forward is to take the NHS out of political hands so knowledgeable professionals can try and plot a way forward.

I don't trust that I would currently get good treatment, especially if it's a chronic issue. But I don't blame the individuals.

No. I don't trust the NHS to have my family's best health interests at heart. They cater for the majority and don't provide care or treatment for individual needs. In particular my DD is very very poorly and we have to pay for all her healthcare privately as no one in the NHS has the capacity or inclination to find out what's wrong with her or the freedom to treat her accordingly. She needs multi disciplinary care and this does not exist on the NHS. Departments don't speak to other departments. Conditions are dealt with in silo. Everything is done on an economic basis, be it through lack of funding or just how the NHS has been created to provide good value for money for the taxpayer. One of the worst things about DD's health is the realisation that healthcare is not necessarily there when you need it.