Printout of cost to NHS

[1dontunderstand]

I don’t think IBU but here goes:

I think every patient should be given a printout of how much their care has cost the NHS.

Every GP visit
Every vaccine for them or their child
Every midwife/health visitor
Every blood test
Every ambulance or A & E visit

I don’t think people have any idea how much their health care costs

We have all heard about how much people in the US pay for their healthcare. However, the US also has by far the highest public expenditure on healthcare in the world too. The US government pays many times more for heakthcare than the UK. However, a large proportion of these costs is paying administrative staff for billing etc. Sounds like OP just wants to waste NHS resources with a pointless administrative exercise.

I would prefer a printout of how much the bloody Tories have cost us to date and to anybody who still supports this shower surcharge them and their assets.

Brexit - £150bn and rising
Test and Trace - £32bn
Doddy PPE - £15 bn
Covid support fraud £4.7bn
Truss Budget £50bn

A large number of DNA are admin errors.

Agree @Fizbosshoes
Recently one of my DC received a hospital appointment which they no longer required. The letter said if you need to cancel/change to contact them asap on the number above. THERE WAS NO NUMBER!

I rang the hospital switchboard and was put through to a number which just rang out every time I tried over next 3 days. So rang the switchboard again and ended up at 2 further depts before I got the right person to cancel the appointment.
How many people would have just given up🤷🏼‍♀️

Yes, totally. There's enough discrimination already!

Will it include the cost of paying for the setting up, organising, typing up and printing of this additional paperwork too?

Fine to let people know how much things cost - just display general charges on a poster, existing electronic screen or website. But it would be expensive to provide individual patients with an itemised cost each time.

I'm very appreciative of the NHS and how it should work.

However to suggest everyone is currently getting wonderful service is somewhat naive I'm afraid.

I read an article about one of the countries that used to behind the iron curtain. I think it was Lithuania? Anyway they have a young population with a really outstanding free health service. It was set up when IT was starting and built into the system.

Everyone received a print out of how much it had cost. It is the most successful part of the whole thing. It makes people really aware and grateful. So nthey don’t go for minor things that don’t need medical attention.

Not sure about a print out but i think a bill should be sent to every idiot that turns up in A&E with something as ridiculous as a sore throat, a cold, a tiny cut and all the other pathetic complaints they may have.

I’m not sure guilt tripping people with long term conditions is the right approach but we do include the average cost of missed appointments each year - if you have an appointment, please go or call to cancel.

People who DNA appointments really annoy me, why not just ring and cancel?

Letters arriving after the appointment has happened. Lots of admin errors lead to missed appointments sadly.

Unable to get through to individual hospital departments to cancel, despite spending ages going in circles via the main numbers with no one ever answering properly in the right department.

Having to leave numerous answer machine messages where the answer message says someone one will call with 24 hours. They call once but you can't always answer (work, etc) and you have to start the whole system again. My hospital's rheumatology department is shocking for this.

Delayed or missing hospital transport not collecting patients in time for appointments,

And then it often doesn't work the other way round. I've had appointments cancelled and they've failed to let me know in time. The last time I had to arrange time off work for an hours appointment. My school had to pay for supply cover for half a day. I arrived to be told my appointment had been cancelled and I should have received a letter. Told them I hadn't and their system showed them it hasn't been done. So a wasted journey which cost me travel and parking money and cost my school a day of supply cover (half a day this time and half a day when the actual appointment happened later.)

To when I had to have an operation so school sorted out a week's supply cover and my operation was cancelled that morning, after I'd prepped, hadn't eaten/drunk for hours and was in the car getting ready to leave home. I know emergencies happen but that cost my work a ton of money, which they then had to pay again a few weeks later for the actual operation.

So these things do go both ways.

Curtains - it IS ableist. There's no two ways about it.

At its worst it could also be dangerous and detrimental to some more vulnerable patients who will see that information and take it to mean they are costing the service too much. So reduce or stop appointments, or worse.

I have never cancelled an appointment in my life. I have turned up and been forgotten about and sat half a day waiting to be seen.

Yes, especially the Truss budget. All that money just gone in such a short time. A lot of good things could have done with that money!

Yup - that's what happens when idiots get control of the levers of the state and our creditors go WTAF you're not a serious country are you and we want more money for our risk - here's a payday loan.

The posters already exist and you will see them in many GP surgeries, clinics and hospitals.

I had similar and even once I'd got through to the right department and told them I no longer needed the appointment TWO weeks before appointment on their answer phone I still got a snotty letter sent via GP.

It's terribly mismanaged.

I recently received no less than 4, yes 4 identical appointment letters for surgery that I had 8 weeks ago.

The new appointment letters were to start the whole process again, not a folllow up or anything.

The left hand clearly does not know what the right hand is doing and that must cost an absolute fortune.

The whole system needs a massive overhaul.

The left hand clearly does not know what the right hand is doing and that must cost an absolute fortune.

Absolutely this. Different GPs every time so the same tests keep being ordered even though they have already shown nothing.

GP did a referral for my DC to have an ultrasound. Then sent us to A&E so referral was taken on by them (without me realising). Radiographer doesn't know who did the referral and said results sent to GP. Hours hanging on phone to chase up, results are not there. Nobody knows where they are. The only way I might find out more information is to make another GP appointment.

Really bafgkes me in this day and age qhy we dont have a centralised system where all healthcare professionals and patients can access records. NHS technology is decades behind where it should be (I heard an NHS consultant on the radio saying the same thing). The initial cost would certainly high but a more efficient system could save billions in the longer term.

I'm actually still waiting for results of a couple of scans I had. The scans took place in December 2021, almost a year ago.

I've given up chasing. My gp has given up chasing.
Symptoms remain the same but no worse. GP suspects the issue which isn't anything serious, scans were to rule anything major out and to confirm peri menopause and Ongoing everything does point to that.

We have to assume that, as we know the radiographers did receive the scans and we be,I've trained them, that all is okay. However, no one knows for sure and no results have been sent to anyone or recorded it seems.

And they couldn't just be repeated as system says they've been done, and was awaiting final reporting.

A year later they are considering it they can be repeated.

All that admin error must have cost a fair amount of money - 2 wasted scans, several gp phone calls, emails and letters chasing and then it all needing to be redone, along with the accompanying blood tests, etc.

All wasted money - I don't want to receive paperwork telling me how much it cost when I haven't even had the chance to receive any results due to no fault of my own!

Why? If a person needs treatment, they need treatment. What’s the point of that? It would cost a fortune.

Why? Do you know how much chemo and cancer surgery costs? I think if you was tolerating chemo with a less than garanteed outcome it would make some people guilty into giving up.

Do you know how much I paid in until my dc disability meant I had to "cash out"

Do you know your just one car accident away or stroke away from being several disabled forever? To be viewed by your former self as a parasitic drain?

Do you know how much neonatal intensive care costs? Do you how much the air ambulance costs? Would you refuse the cost if it was you needing your legs amputated at the scene of crash to release you from twisted metal? Do you think the cost is on the Drs mind when they are sawing your legs off while your conscious on the A2?

Please try to imagine a life outside of your own experiences. A few unessary trips to the gp is piss in the ocean to a course of cancer treatment. I personally think everyone should pay a token £5 to see a gp unless on UC but I Don not and never will condone paying trns of thousands to save a premature baby or a mum with cancer.

If we had a set amount on our head of nhs money everyone would die of cancer. Most baby's under 37 weeks would die. People would bleed out in their cars.

I can believe that there are a small percentage of people who misuse and abuse the health service (calling ambulances unnecessarily, turning up to A and E with minor ailments that could be treated at home, deliberately missing appointments etc)

However the large majority of people will be trying to use the NHS in the manner it was designed, and the system is failing because people are living longer and surviving illnesses that were previously fatal, which although is a positive thing, it means a far greater numbers are trying to access care than can adequately given.

Add in overworked staff and poor morale , staff leaving, brexit, poorly paid HCPs and carers and not enough investment or resource to update admin or IT systems and that is partly why the NHS is failing for both the people that work within it and the patients it's designed to care for.

The collapse of the NHS is not caused by Janet not bothering to turn up for her GP appointment and Roy turning up at A and E because he has a blister.

Some of us have conditions that need medication just to keep us living and regular appointments to support us. How do you think this would make us feel? More importantly, what is it you think the more unscrupulous media outlets might do with information like this? What could be the outcome for people with chronic conditiond and disabilities?

In the last 3 weeks I've had the most awful time with GPs and the NHS in general.
A letter telling me how much it cost to not actually treat me would have me raging, then sending a letter back saying I cried at their "treatment" of me and have decided going forward that i am opting out of everything that the NHS offer as standard like breast screening, and will where at all possible use a private drs service if I can possibly afford it at the time. Yay I'm saving the fucking NHS fortune now.

I think a lot of people have misunderstood why OP wants people to know the real cost of the NHS.

To make them appreciate it more and understand what they’d be really paying without it.
The difference between the UK and America.
How lucky we really are to have the NHS and how dire things would be without it.