To be upset about my mum’s attitude to the NHS?

[Beautifulblues]

She’s turning 64 this year and so has benefited from the NHS all of her life.

She came from a fairly poor background, council house, working class, she had to leave school at 16 to get a job as they needed to contribute to the household. She shared a bedroom with her siblings until she was 14, very little in the way of luxuries.

Despite all of that she’s now a staunch conservative and she has said several times recently that she believes the NHS is no longer fit for purpose and we should be looking towards a health insurance system like other countries (she referenced France here but I have no idea of their healthcare system). I’m feeling very angry about it…she’s benefitted this long but doesn’t want me or her 4 year old grandson to benefit from the wonderful NHS as he gets older.

It's like Boris's (alleged) attitude to COVID. If it's only killing the elderly what's the problem?
Has anyone read the Richard Osman books? A retirement community most of us can only dream of.

I am very much a non conservative- but I don't think it's working as things are - I do think it needs an overhaul but not in an American style way where unless you are over/under a certain age the insurance premiums are eye watering and often tied in to jobs. I do think we need to look at French/German/ (other nations too) way of running things. However it can't all be done based on cost. In Germany most modest towns still have a local hospital with a small A&E , maternity , injuries capability etc. they also have local police,,fire station etc. we have centred everything here on huge units and a consequence is that I think many areas are actually not that safe to live in given an emergency.

France and Germany have far more healthcare staff per capita, we could build these 40 hospitals Boris promised but the simple fact is, we don't have enough well educated people to train and then staff them.

2 or 3 A levels required to become HCP & people with those qualifications can do other better paid, less stressful jobs, i ve nieces and nephews educated to this level, not one is going into healthcare, its Law, Accountancy, Business, Economics etc

On top of this, we need around 300k people to staff Social Care properly, without which, no reform of the NHS will work.

We voted to stop FOM but that has consequence that we all need to acknowledge.

in this country you need a degree to be a nurse.

By the time someone has got their degree with all the debt that comes with it they can’t afford to be a nurse and don’t want to be emptying bed pans and mopping up vomit and all the other stuff that comes with being a nurse.
Friend was a nurse. She loved her job. She had risen through the ranks to be in charge of a group of wards. She had started straight from school armed with her 5 top grade CSEs doing day release from college.
Come the last Labour government getting in and they changed the playing field and she was made redundant.
I don’t think she ever recovered.

I don’t think the NHS did either.

I've recently spent 21 or so hours with my mum in A&E

I saw appalling service, not just to my mum, she was lucky because I was there.

I won't go into detail as I'd be bashed on here but , as far as I'm concerned, there needs to be a thorough rethinking on nursing care.

Yeah i used to have a car with no heating and it would rarely go over 50mph!

Things move on

& Labour didn't introduce degrees until they were about to be kicked out in 2009 but it didn't become compulsory until 2013, under the Tories.

Nursing has been degree level in many countries for years,

HCA's now do the job s nurses from your era would have done and even then, SENs or Auxiliaries would have been doing most of the mundane stuff, not SRNs.

But it wouldn't matter if we went back to 5 CSE's, there isn't the number of people in the UK to fill all the vacancies, let alone who want too.

I live in the Netherlands and as soon as you get over 50, the health insurance costs more. My husband and I pay nearly 400 euros a month for the two of us, and this is just for basic healthcare and up to 1000 for dental. I really miss the NHS, it and social care need more funding, private healthcare is not the way to go.

Like many here, I think the NHS needs a re-think, not a revolution, in light of all that has changed since it was created in 1947. The technological and medical progress that a large scale real world model for study has been of immense value in studying medicine at population level. In 1947, the UK and the nascent NHS was hamstrung by war and debt, but the science clicked in. In the 1950s, healthcare was not very different to the 1930s, but the first vaccination programmes against TB and tetanus, dipheria started to improve common childhood killers, in the early 60s, a vaccine for polio. My mum (now 88) remembers nursing children with all these illnesses, outdoors in the case of TB.

So now, we can do so much to cure ordinary disease, we turn our attention to babies and children born with life-limiting diseases, who might have been still born a few years earlier, and because we can do more medically, more survive and some thrive, and from many years on MN, it's usually because mum moves a mountain to get the care/support/help needed.

None of which is bad. But the downside is that we have tried to over-rule nature's regulating function, Darwin's survival of the fittest and best adapted. It was and remains a harsh rule but it's essential within a population.

I'm not a Tory but I certainly think we could benefit from looking at how other countries do it (but not US style stuff ) - Germany , France and Netherlands for example . However the problem I foresee is that I think National insurance levels should drop if separate insurance is needed and I also think we probably have higher levels who would need their insurance covered off by the state (I'm not sure on the figures relative to Germany, France, Netherlands) - I would also expect the same standards as those places too if it's insurance based.

OP what do you think is worse about how France approaches universal health care compared to how the UK does?

Funny how these threads are always packed with armchair experts saying how inefficient/wasteful etc the NHS is . And yet the WHO, you know, people who actually know what they're on about, have looked and numbers and outcomes and compared systems, rate the NHS extremely highly for efficiency and value for money.

@Beautifulblues
Tell your mum just to go private for healthcare if that's what she wants, she has that option now.

The World Health Organization has carried out the first ever analysis of the world's health systems. Using five performance indicators to measure health systems in 191 member states, it finds that France provides the best overall health care followed among major countries by Italy, Spain, Oman, Austria and Japan

In Europe, health systems in Mediterranean countries such as France, Italy and Spain are rated higher than others in the continent. Norway is the highest Scandinavian nation, at 11th .

The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of GDP on health services, ranks 18 th .

But it isn’t just nursing where now you need more qualifications to do the same job that you could do without any qualifications.

Why does a plasterer/painter/plumber need to be able to analyse a poem in order to go to college to do a level 2 course

Why do you need a geography GCSE in order to do a dance course at college.

Dd is a manager with no qualifications in the field she is in,

She was in charge of people who were older than her and who had spent £50k and 3 years getting a degree in order that one day they were able to get to the position Dd was in at 18

Also GPTec1 friend was made redundant under a Labour government.

Then people wonder why we have a nursing shortage

All professions need training. You don't want the people caring for you to be trained?

More people than ever are accessing the NHS.

The problem is, people think it's ok for employees in the private sector to earn a decent salary, entitled to bonuses, pay rises, training and promotions. But god forbid highly qualified doctors and nurses and support staff want similar.

People seem to think the NHS is a charity and it's workers should earn minimum wage.

I'd love to see the faces of people who want a private health care system once it's in action. Just wait until you fall on hard times and realise it might kill you. It's like Brexit all over again.

A university degree (like private school education) is like makeup. In the age of AI and outsourcing, a worker in a developed country needs to show that they have some qualities that make them a more desirable candidate and 'worth it' compared to someone from a third world country or a chatbot. If you get into a prestigious university or you get 9 As for your GCSEs, you are showing that you are hardworking,. intelligent and committed and likely to be from a privileged background where your parents prized education (not often the case but people make these assumptions). This is why we have a buffoon Boris running the country for years and why all our prime ministers were educated at Oxford or Cambridge - people value such things.
Yes going to an average or low ranking university wouldn't command such kudos but in general people who go to even bad universities are from middle class backgrounds. And if you get a first from a bad university, some employers may overlook the university.

This is why so many people choose university. It does increase earning power. Many people who don't have degrees end up on minimum wage without a plan. If you don't have a plan and go to university, you probably end up in some low end office job but there are often chances to progress.

It's like why a pretty girl may choose to wear makeup, no one is saying that she can't get a job or date without it but it sure helps. And yes it is expensive. But a lot of things people do in life- buying a house or having a child are expensive.

Also nursing is a profession and possibly making it a profession where degree is mandatory increases its prestige. I know nurses from other countries do want to come to the UK because they feel nursing is more respected here. So that helps the supply shortage.

What silly woke courses would those be? Quite seriously, nobody has ever sent me on one. We go to things like CPR refreshers, infection control updates, medical conferences. Please give me an example of “silly woke courses” NHS staff regularly get sent on.

I agree with you mother. I work for the NHS (majority of colleagues agree it’s not fit for purpose tends to be younger who haven’t been worn down by the system who have faith in the NHS. Also a Labour supporter

it’s no longer fit for purpose and we need to look at insurance funding healthcare we don’t need to follow the US

We need Labour and the Tories to not use the NHS as a political football and to be bloody honest

The NHS is some weird religion to a lot of people and to criticise it anyway is akin to blasphemy.

@HRTQueen I agree and I'm not a Tory. We need to follow a principle of available to all in need and not have restrictions based on having prior conditions etc - it really mustn't be mental money or employer based either like the USA- I also think there should as part of it be mandatory annual bloods and check ups so we can be preventing conditions early on - if necessary incentivise it