Angry at long nhs waits

[glitterwobbles]

I get daily headaches and nerve pain in arms and legs.Was diagnosed with cervical myelopathy last summer.
Was referred to another hospital as mine does not have any neurosurgeons and need surgery to prevent it getting worse and possible paralysis.
Have been told that the wait for an appointment is 18 months.
I know that the NHS is struggling after covid. But I have a condition that will get worse and if i had the money could have the surgery privately within weeks.
Just feel let down by NHS and as if the list keeps getting longer as when I was referred it was 10 months. Feel as if I will never get to the top

Disagree.
The two main parties have totally different views on the direction of the NHS, Labour want a publicly funded/owned healthcare system, the Tories want a privatised model. ... leading Tories wrote about this before coming into Govt.

Re organisations, of which the NHS has had several, are extremely disruptive & take years, people like the OP needing urgent care, cannot wait.

So i would prefer far more spending on staff recruitment and esp retention first THEN once we get waiting lists down, look at how it is structured but in international comparisons, the NHS does well on efficiency, badly on critical illness care, esp cancer and very badly on number of Dr's Nurses and beds.

Two years that is fucking ridiculous. If we are interested in a comparison in public health systems. I got diagnosed with epilepsy as a uni student in New Zealand, and got an MRI on the public health system (NZ citizen) in about three months. CT scan in about six weeks. That was under their last labour govt about 15 years ago.

Bojo and co are not totally for blame, we can hark back to Thatcher for fiscal austerity across the health, education and welfare systems.

So i would prefer far more spending on staff recruitment and esp retention first THEN once we get waiting lists down, look at how it is structured but in international comparisons

Well I'm sure you would, but you're looking at tax raises to achieve this and at the present time I'm not so sure how well that would go down. Especially as the money simply isn't being used to greatest efficiency right now.

Also it's impossible to tackle the NHS without also considering the even bigger challenges with Social Care.

Well, the Govt has raised taxes for ordinary workers but not for the wealthy and how would you deal with the millions waiting (and dying) whilst a reorg takes place?

Don't really understand why anyone would be against measures to increase staff retention.... unless its to run down the NHS.

I do agree social care needs urgent addressing, its a privatised model, doesn't work and needs integrating into the NHS, so the two work alongside each other BUT once again, the Tories aren't interested, just kind words, no more staff or wage rises, the number 1 reason for low staff numbers & even worse retention.

Funny how there’s a magic money tree to pay over £100bn for a railway no-one op wants, but not enough money to fund the NHS properly. You’re angry at the wrong people OP.

Well, the Govt has raised taxes for ordinary workers but not for the wealthy and how would you deal with the millions waiting (and dying) whilst a reorg takes place?

I think the only actual answer to that is to focus on essential services until we decide what the remit of the nhs should be in the present day. The money simply isn't there and I'm not sure where it's going to come from in the very short term.

The money simply isn't there and I'm not sure where it's going to come from in the very short term.

Any money will have to be raised by wealth taxes as we cannot burden income any more. Yes in an ideal world the 1% would pay more but that's not going to happen without global policies.

we still spend less than EU averages on health, the figures only look comparable when we add in private healthcare spending

Except the majority of the EU countries have private funding included, because their systems include private funding. You are not comparing like with like.

Switzerland. Switzerland comes top of the Euro Health Consumer Index 2018, and it's firmly above the eleven-country average in the Commonwealth Fund's list too. There are no free, state-run services here – instead, universal healthcare is achieved by mandatory private health insurance and some government involvement

Are the Tories wrong though? Every other system in Europe is part private part state. I just can't get my head around our insistence for a fully state funded system, when pretty much no-one else does it that way, and they all get better healthcare. And before anyone piles on, I am not talking of the US model, but the rest of the EU model.......

There are many, many issues.

1. The failure to properly fund nurses training. Nursing isn't paid enough to have people graduating with huge amounts of debt, nursing bursaries were essential.

1. The failure to properly fund & resource (separately from the NHS) social care to meet the needs of an ageing population. The NHS never had the capacity for managing the chronic conditions of the very elderly for decades, not to mention the problem of bed blocking where people are taking up space in hospital due to care needs not medical needs.

1. The public health & society crisis. Diabetes is often preventable and it accounts for 10 percent of the NHS budget. Mental health is regularly one of biggest areas of spending at 10% plus. A chunk of this is down to lifestyle/economic/society based issues like obesity, poverty, and poor community support networks.

1. Conversely, some societal factors mean that things which used to kill people prematurely now do so less - heart disease and lung cancer etc, caused by poor nutrition & smoking. The downside to this is instead of people dying quite fast mid 50s or 60s of heart attack, they live longer and have a longer period of geriatric ill health and cost the NHS more as a result.

I just can't get my head around our insistence for a fully state funded system, when pretty much no-one else does it that way

Especially as we also don't want to increase taxes further. Something's got to give somewhere.

InChocolateWeTrust Your points 2, 3 and 4 - Absolutely agree.

Nurse training I think is a red herring. Nurse trainees DO get bursaries, of £5k per year. The student debt is irrelevant, as it is for anyone else. If you don't earn enough, you don't pay it back. There are thousands of potential trainees who can't get on courses at the moment, so no lack of students, just more places are needed. The biggest issue is though, the drop out rate, what can be done to ensure all these keen youngsters are motivated to keep going once they join the workforce.

Plenty of European countries have a tax payer funded model, the private ins element isn't like ours at all, its a top up, available to almost anyone, often paid for by employers.

Personally i think thats a good model to follow, as is introducing some extra charges, with exceptions for those on lower incomes.

How about the "something has to give" is to tax the wealthy? their marginal rates of income tax are lower than what most of us pay.

But in a country that can find 100s of billions for Trident and HS2, not sure that the argument that there is no money is valid, poor healthcare costs the country vast sums of money, productive people stuck on sick pay, at home.

@nocoolnamesleft Be angry at the fucking Tories who have been destroying the NHS for the next decade. I hope your wait is less than you fear.

How about being angry at Tony Blair and New Labour who wanted to sell it off ?

www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/moment-of-honesty-is-required-new-labour-began-dismantling-of-our-nhs/

The old chestnut about too many managers.
What about having enough managers and clinical staff ? Funnily enough many managers are clinical staff (we have 4 band 7 ward managers all who do the odd clinical shift).
Equally get rid of the managers and clinical staff will have to take on their duties anyway just as nurses have taken on some junior doctor tasks.

@Thesefeetaremadeforwalking he didn't though did he ? Actually poured money in to the NHS and improved things. Why not blame jeremy hunt who actually wrote a book advocating it ?

Private sector management ? Like capita or group 7 lol. Because management of privatised utilities has gone so well 🙄

@InChocolateWeTrust good post. And far more complex than the simplistic 'all mangers are bad' mantra.

My Dad is 82 and has several ongoing medical conditions. He gets appointment after appointment at the local hospital, which is a 40 mile round trip for me to have to take him, have time off work and Dad is so frail that it knocks the stuffing out of him for days. And the honest answer is that he's never going to "get better", his GP could manage these conditions just as well as some student Doctor in a hospital clinic.

You add that up across the UK and that would save billions.

Have to agree with that, far too much waste which needs sorting out 👍

How about the "something has to give" is to tax the wealthy? their marginal rates of income tax are lower than what most of us pay.

While I see why this would be the go to solution for public sector workers, the unfortunate truth is there's a tipping point where this ceases to raise more income as there are many loopholes and international opt outs.

But in a country that can find 100s of billions for Trident and HS2

While those were disgraceful wastes of public money, it's not carte blanche either. The economic situation is much more challenging right now than it was when that money was spent. We have high levels of covid borrowing to service, plus interest rates on the rise, so I don't think anyone should be thinking because lots of money has been spent on things in the past, that's justification for lots of borrowing now.

You can’t say that about Labour 😳

They have promised to save the NHS until they get into power and will then realise the multiple problems, waste being one of them

Supply and demand. None of us have a duty to work for less than we're worth. If consultants and GPs and any other hcps don't like the pay and work conditions in the UK they're more than entitled to quit, do private work or move to a country that actually pays them what they're worth. It's not their responsibility to keep the NHS afloat and they do more than enough of this out of goodwill already. How come when bankers and CEOs crashed our economy and are just plain fraudulant with our economy we weren't allowed to adequately penalise them because 'they're too valuable to our society and will just leave'. Even lorry drivers got the same reaction. And yet we think healthcare staff should just take it up the arse? This deluded attitude is another reason why the NHS is shot. News flash, they're working people with lives and familes not saints