To think the NHS has already failed.

[Goingforplatinum]

5 hour wait for a cat1 ambulance for a child. Unresponsive patients being taken to hospital by neighbours. 90 hour wait in A&E, unsafe staffing on wards, 7 month wait for coil or implant fitting. The NHS isn't failing. We need to admit its failed

No. I don’t want to pay for social care for a pensioner sitting in a £1m mortgage free house.

@MarshaBradyo but we are being required to change behaviours.
My local health board has twice recently had to put out a Do Not attend A&E notice.
My GP sometimes has their messaged changed to say they have staff shortages so call back tomorrow unless it's an emergency.
This is making us change by not accessing healthcare

But you already pay for their pension and healthcare, why not social care in particular?

Yes but it doesn’t require the level of emotive reaction there had to be to get people to stay home etc. that is a huge ask

Social care should be free at the point of use, regardless of housing wealth BUT there should then be much higher taxes on inheritance on everyone to fund this.

Those unlucky enough to need many years of dementia care are then treated the same as those lucky enough to die suddenly in their sleep while still living independently.

They both pass on the same amount of wealth to their families while also socialising the cost of the small number of people who need a long period of care across the entire population.

“Why should people who earn £250,000 a year be able to access NHS care free?”
^^
Because their taxes pay for it.

You could equally ask, why should someone who earns and contributes nothing towards it, be able to access the NHS for free?

All those services you use like hospitals and schools and police and streetlights and bin collection and so on aren’t actually ‘free’ they’re paid for by high earners. So
saying that high earners should have to pay to use the NHS is insane.

Let’s keep this simple. If a public service has collapsed, as the NHS has, then either taxes must go up, or the scope of what the service does must be reduced. Here, both are probably needed. (Why on earth are taxpayers funding unnecessary sex change operations and lifetime drugs for men with identity issues, when we can’t afford to run ambulances properly?)

Hey, remember pre-Brexit when some of us warned that the NHS was reliant on cheap labour from the EU? No? I do.

As of September 2022 there were 133,400 vacancies in the NHS. www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/nhs-vacancy-rates-point-to-deepening-workforce-crisis

The elephant in the room is the level of alcohol abuse in Britain.

Alcohol and smoking cos the NHS £17 billion 2017-2022. www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/alcohol-to-claim-63000-lives-over-five-years-1.718406

I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t smoke. Why should I endlessly fund the medical problems of those who do?

The NHS is not free, we all pay for it. In this country we pay taxes to the Gov who then fund and control healthcare on our behalf. Other countries do things differently.

But the point is at the moment we're all paying for it but most of us can't access healthcare.
Are other countries such as France, Germany etc having the same issues with citizens still being asked to stay away from GO and A&E, or being told their wait for operation will be 2 years?

With great respect to you and your colleagues (from the bottom of my heart), we have to be allowed to discuss this.

No one blames NHS staff for this. We all know you are heroic.

But some of us are frightened and upset at the prospect that we won’t be able to obtain either primary or emergency care. We pay for this through our taxes and we have a right to talk about it without being accused of NHS bashing.

Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours (smoking, drinking, poor diet), personal responsibility and public health are complicated. As for the financial side, very few people are actually net contributors to the NHS and the enormous tax levied on those products goes into the general pot which helps to pay for the NHS and other public services. I do think that money should be ring-fenced for the NHS but that will never happen.

Why were we given a daily total of covid deaths for 2 years, long after the peaks, but we're not being told how many excess deaths we have daily now.
My guess is because the covid deaths were "the public's fault".
Excess deaths through people unable to access healthcare is not the publics fault

Spot on

My Gp surgery hasn't accepted any e consults or anything not urgent for 5 weeks.

The initial big mistake, right at the very beginning, was to run the NHS and Social Care separately with two distinct budgets, two departments, two entirely different entities running the disparate systems. If anything were to change, this single change would make a huge difference.

@KnittedCardi Yes agree, this would be hugely transformative.

I remember hearing this very thing being discussed on tv a few months ago. They were saying that back when the nhs was first proposed Aneurin Bevan & co made a decision that Free at the point of delivery applied to medical treatment only. Social care would be means tested and that's the reason it was not part of the nhs.

Integrated Care Systems should help, but because of budgets and crises, keep on being put back.

@Oher I agree with you but those smokers and drinkers pay a shit load of tax. Dont know the maths but they could pay more in than they take out.

What would you like to do? Assuming that we can all agree that it's not fair to disenfranchise people from accessible healthcare - not everyone could afford or would be provided with private health insurance through their employer, what is the alternative? There is no one stop shop for resolving the issues that the NHS faces. It does need an update but we all need to take responsibility too. We can reduce the impact on it by keeping healthy (as much as we can - some things are out of our control) and knowing what A&E is there for and not abusing it. Equally though, it needs investment and people need to feel encouraged to work for it.

I think that there are genuine debates to be had but I'm also a bit cynical about posts that suggest that the NHS is finished.

Well yes, it could be done in part but the government would have to pay for it. Which it doesn't want to do. The private sector is a bit stretched at the moment too - my friend had to wait 2 months for orthopaedic surgery recently.

Daily deaths were for compliance

Do you think they were made up numbers?

We had a new virus, hospitalising and in many cases killing 1000s per week and no vaccines.

I 'm really at a loss as to what anyone thought we could otherwise do, countries like US, Brazil and Russia tried a no or little lockdown plan and suffered enormously.

Plus unless you believe the moon landings were fake, it should be remembered that most of the developed world came to the same conclusions.
Our mistake was locking down to late and then forced to do so for far longer.

With huge implications for the NHS and social care.

None of what you have posted changes the basic fact that reporting daily deaths was an effective method to get compliance.

Especially as you’ve written Do you think they were made up numbers? so assuming something not even written.

Reporting was effective and meant the public complied, pretty much over what was expected

Sorry i read it at first as you didn't believe the numbers.

I believe in freedom of information and Govts not hiding stuff.

Places were shut and laws put in place, we had little or no choice.

But what would you have done instead?

Tbh it wasn’t so much an argument for or against using it for compliance, just that it was very effective and we don’t need to do the same now re excess deaths (in response to pp asking about why we’re not hearing much on that atm).

I could probably post about whether it should have been used in that way but too covided out. Feel a bit blank on it so maybe another time 😀

It depends on your view of the damages of COVID. Would ten of thousand more vulnerable dead, be better than kids missing out on years of education and a country billions of pounds in debt. The interesting question is how much longer these people will live I.e how much value have we added, it will be interesting to see what happens next year after a year of letting flu plus covid run unchecked. Remember nearly 25% of deaths were care home residents.

In my eyes our failures are:

We didn't completely isolate the vulnerable away from the rest of society by law. Instead we punished the mildly unwell.

We attempted to treat all COVID cases so the NHS missed cancer cases that could have been saved. The nightingales should have been used for the over X years and those at to much risk to survive to have high flow O2 and see what happens with minimal medical supervision to free up staff to deal with non-covid. On top of the we isolated positive but well staff instead of having them on the COVID wards further reducing staff numbers.

We had a very good vaccine candidate that we didn't use emergency power to push through and when we did release it months too late we didn't make it mandatory.

We closed schools leading to missed education and MH issues in kids. Teachers faced a much reduced threat than the NHS yet got to stay home. In future teachers need to be treat the same as NHS staff ie get on with it.

We kept restrictions such as social distancing far to long leading to increased economic damage. The pingdemic should have been a simple alert to say hey stay away from granny for two weeks please.

Goves statement that the virus did not discriminate was the worst miss truth ever it really did. What we needed at the time was government who could balance the economic and social damage against the scientific threat, what we got was a response more suited to a VHF or Polio than a SARS virus.

Nightingales were PR, could never have been staffed, they were to prove the UK could build a hospital quickly, waste of time and money.

We are democracy, we don't force untried drugs on people, we are not Russia.
Plus these things have to be tested.

We did not treat all covid cases, nothing like it, my Nan died at home, so did my aunt, we don't catch all cancer cases either, our rates on cancer treatments and outcomes have been bottom of the European league for many years.

Every country pretty much reacted as we did.

But like marsha i'm pretty washed up about CV, before xmas, the daily deaths with (not caused by) cv was less than 50 per day.

I'd rather focus on the cutting the 500 or so deaths caused by people not getting treatment right now and looking at measures to limit the 8 to 10k nhs staff off each day, NHS forces all med staff positive to stay off for 5 days min BUT then adds it to their sick record, which may mean loss of pay or a disciplinary :(