The state of the NHS right now is terrifying

[Faciadipasta]

I am feeling genuinely scared for us as a country health care wise. I was reading today about a chap who died of internal bleeding while his family were kept on hold to 999 for 10 minutes as nobody even answered the phone.
Then there are all the people who die while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, because they are all lined up.outside the hospitals unable to offload their patients.
People can't see a GP at all, so there are bound to be loads who are dying of things that could have been prevented if they'd been seen. Waits at A and E are enormous and they don't even have enough chairs so people with serious injuries or illnesses are having to just sit on the floors in the corridors.
We're actually starting to feel like one of those warzone countries that you see on the news and it is scaring me shitless.
I mean even in the US you wouldn't just be left to die because there was nobody to answer the phone although admittedly you'd probably end up bankrupt for paying back the care, but at least you wouldn't be dead!
I personally feel like we have no care, no safety net. And it's scary.
Will it get better? What can be done?

People need to check up on this stuff. I recall news reports re Turkey dental causing complications

We absolutely do not need a private healthcare system. We need a properly funded NHS that isn't actively being sabotaged by a Tory government. We need to increase NHS wages to attract staff and retain the staff we have so we can stop relying on hideously expensive agency staff.

I think I'd be supportive of some sort of co-pay system. If it was reasonable. The problem would be that like a PP said there would have to be so many exemptions that it probably wouldn't actually bring enough in to make a difference.
Elderly and I guess maternity and long term chronic conditions would presumably need to be free, but then generally they are the groups that cost the most. But maybe if there was a small cost to see a GP? Not taken upfront but billed? I don't know. It would probably be better than not being able to see a GP at all.

Maybe the only people.who would actually get free appointments (rather than a small charge) would need to be children and people on universal credit or pension credit? Could that help?

@TheNosehasit

You didn't answer my questions

Do these better health care systems provide acupuncture to help people sleep for free?

What do police working conditions have to do with hcp working conditions and why do you think nurses get paid for lunch hours?

It does. But if the GP doesn't read it.................?

Any time i have tried to use a pharmacist instead of a GP I have been sent back to the GP .... I was also deeply unhappy last time that I was forced to disclose my personal issues in a busy shop environment.

Likewise why can't GPs as partners employ more HCPs that could do the stuff that takes up their time but doesn't need a GP? Eg more nurse prescribers? Why did it take 6 weeks for a referral letter to go in for my DS to dermatology - surely there are standard letters for these things that admin can do, or an IT system that would ping a note to an admin person with all the relevant details

@RegardingMary I can assure you I am absolutely NOT 'talking shite' , nor 'wading in with misinformed nonsense'. I have heard many tales of abuse of the system by staff from my friend, who is a 'band 5' nurse in the Scottish NHS. Go off on sick leave for 6 months, back 2 or 3 days, then off again. I am not for one minute saying the service isn't underfunded, but it IS badly managed, and A LOT of staff play the system.

@GelatoQueen employing more allied HCPs is part of the great government plan for general practice. Unfortunately they don't exist in great numbers either. They're also meant to be propping up lots of other services - Nurse Prescribers now run hospital clinics, out of hours services, A+E and so on - there's only so many of them to go round!

We've had a big drive recently to have more Clinical Pharmacists in GP surgeries. Many of them are excellent and can deal with some medication issues as well as if not better than lots of us GPs. But it means there aren't enough Pharmacists in actual chemists any more. Or they leave the hospital pharmacies to work in GP for a while. It's all still juggling not enough staff.

@PolaDeVeboise

Then your friend is telling you porkies because that's not possible

Sick pay is calculated on a rolling year.

You cant go off for 6 months resume and reset. If you go back off it starts again from the date you were last off sick.

Absence management is hotly monitored.

@GelatoQueen

Lol.

Like no one though of that

🤣

YANBU. It was heartbreaking on the news the other night listening to desperate emergency calls made by a dying young man who just couldn't get anyone to take him seriously. Multiple phone appointments with his GP got him nowhere and the coroner said just one face to face would have saved his life as it was obvious to even non medical people who saw him that he was very, very ill. He had a standard ear infection but because it wasn't treated properly and he was seen it eventually spread to his brain and killed him.

@Topgub - do you work in the Scottish NHS too? If so, apologies, I have obviously been lied to. If not...

@PolaDeVeboise

Yes. I do.

The juggling of mentioned by @Prestissimo is a nightmare. GP pharmacists can be a great asset but the most easily transferrable workforce are from hospitals. So hospitals are having a pharmacy staffing crisis. And in community they spend half their day giving flu vaccines. If only health professionals could be cloned.

These threads are always full of people who have never worked in the nhs but are absolutely convinced that they know how to fix it.

They know a friend who works for it and they can tell you how badly its managed, how wasteful and inefficient. How you'd never get that in the private sector

It's mostly a load of misinformed rubbish. Especially as we all know hoe wasteful and ineffective the private sector is. The only thing the private sector is good at is making rich people more money.

Oh and the why don't they just do this blindingly obvious thing?

Like no one has thought of the blindingly obvious thing

@Prestissimo and @SizzlestheSausageDog

Yup.

Everyone fishing from the same pond. That is getting smaller by the day.

Ours don't give flu vaccines though, so we do at least use them for their job-specific skills.

By community I meant chemist *

Ah yes, that makes more sense.

Probably we could get some trained-up sixth formers to give flu jabs, now I think of it

I agree with this. I have worked both in Trusts and in NHSE. The amount of waste and incompetence I saw in NHSE was off the scale, whereas the Trusts I worked at were generally working hard to be as efficient as they could despite not having enough people. It was depressing to compare the two.

Or you could exercise, eat properly, cut down on UPF, booze and fags and do a yoga session at home via YouTube.
Lavender bath, hobbies etc

Sorted!

As someone who works in a hospital it is soul destroying when you suggest an improvement or cost saving and get ignored. Then they bring in a management consultant who says the same thing and somehow it means more from Joe Bloggs health consultancy and they actually act on it.

Some of the nonsense people post about the NHS on here is crazy.

On another recent thread someone posted that ICU doctors had told her that all ICU medical and nursing staff worked a pattern of 2 weeks on and 6-7 weeks off. And she stated this as fact, despite the fact it is obviously utterly bullshit.

To be charitable, she may have misunderstood and they were actually talking about their on-call rota, but it's more likely that these posters are just making stuff up to spread misinformation to make the NHS seem hugely wasteful.

A bit like the poster on this thread whose brother the 'neurosurgeon' thinks the only problem with the NHS is 'young nurses' taking the piss. Yeah, right.

I don't work for the NHS any more (I'm non clinical and my profession can work jn many industries), and I am very glad I got out. Sympathies to those who are still having to deal with this.

Within a few posts you have your answer: there are still people who think that the reason the NHS is in such a mess is that 'we' (or the nasty Tories) don't spend enough money on it. While that argument prevails the real issues of dreadful management/organisation/philosophy/insufficient accountability are never going to be addressed.

At last, even the Labour party (Wes Streeting) are beginning to get the message.

I have been involved with the NHS as a user, supplier, volunteer worker and supporter of users since the 1960s. Year on year there are more managers and admin staff drifting about, the requirements to be entered on this system and that system multiply, there's more slightly broken expensive equipment lying in the corridors, more user-unfriendly systems introduced and the waits get longer, the mistakes continue, some of the staff get brusquer and many of the staff get more stressed out. And yet still there are cries for more money.

As a volunteer at Covid injection clinics I have been impressed by how efficiently the pharmacy and off-NHS-premises ones were run. Returning to NHS premises I've been exasperated by the number of managers drifting by, re-organising a perfectly well-running system and making unnecessary demands on both the volunteers and even the vaccinees. Then they bustle off and the volunteers put all the systems back so it runs properly again, but what a waste of resources.