Am I being unreasonable in thinking that we are suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome re the NHS

[Newbutoldfather]

This is inspired by another thread about a mother with a child in pain being kept hours without painkillers without being triaged, and the responses on that thread. However I have also had an awful experience with my own child over the last year.

it seems amazing to me that in one of the richest countries in the world (we still are), people are content to accept substandard care which would embarrass a country with 10% of our GDP.

In France, MRI’s are standard for muscular injury or complex fractures. They happen within a few days and, often, on the day. ( my reference is Paris btw, not sure about rural France). In addition, you always get a same day GP appointment, regardless of seriousness, no hassle, no waiting for an hour at 8AM.

Finally, although there are some real heroes in the NHS, my own experience (and that of the other poster) are that many lack compassion, which is about culture, not money.

I don’t know the ‘solution’. Any solution is multifaceted and will take time. However, if we don’t admit the scale of the problem and continue to say how marvellous free-at-the-point-of-use is, we will never get acceptable medicine in this country for any but the rich.

Vote Labour. It’s the party of public service and the NHS was in a decent state by the time they left.

I agree. There is an endemic lack of empathy and care amongst the NHS staff (A&E and maternity wards are absolutely appalling in my experience).
We will never be able to spend our way out of the "human problem".
That lack of care is very typical in low-accountability government institutions. I don't know how to make staff accountable in the same way they would be in a private business without privatising the NHS.

I agree - it’s not about labour / conservative either as they’ll all run it to the ground and milk what they can out of us.

I assume to get a same day appointment you’d need actual staff. Perhaps we could assess why the staff are leaving in droves.

Lrivatising it won’t necessarily lead to better retention. You just pay for the same service instead.

We all know it's shit a lot of the time now. It has got much worse since 2010 (guess what happened then), the decade before that, things were quite good. Those of us who work in the NHS know that it's shit and most of us are trying to do a good job in shitty circumstances. But nobody wants to pay what it would actually cost to run a decent healthcare system. And before people say about us spending more than ever before, that we're average in spend for OECD - we still spend less than countries like France, Germany, Sweden. That's what we need to be aiming for.

Hahahahahahaha

it was dreadful then, it is just a lot worse now. It has nothing to do with who is in charge politically - no amount of money would fix it. It needs a complete systemic overhaul, as well as some soul searching as to what we really need it to do.

It IS about Labour and Conservatives and the fucking lack of money the fucking Tories don't put in. They've sold our data for pennies to private US healthcare corporations, and when you're pushing your 10 tonne tits round in a wheelbarrow like a Channel 5 documentary, because you couldn't afford to see a private GP, think about your voting choices.

Staff are leaving for higher salaries overseas. These countries are able to afford higher salaries due to having part private insurance funded systems. We cannot retain staff unless we rise salaries, and we cannot raise salaries unless we change the funding ethos of the nhs. Can we have a German system now please, because the other options are ever descending standards of the current nhs or a terrible system such as the American one.

I am sorry for your experience OP but it is not the same as mine. I've always been treated with care and compassion by NHS staff, and received excellent medical care.

And I don’t want to plough an increasingly high amount of gdp into the nhs. It’s a bottomless pit, and it is not the only priority we have. I’m in Scotland and education is an absolute joke. They are shutting endless swimming pools and libraries. The roads are terrible, not to mention the fact that ferries are cancelled at random all the time for weeks

The NHS does need more money and that is a part of the solution, but far from all of it.

The management is appalling, either ex nurses who join management, as it us better paid, or management consultants who just try to fit a solution that they would use for a factory into a hospital.

But, at a fundamental level, there is a lack of trust between carers and patients. If you have a private scan, you get emailed the scan report and can see the raw scan. You have to really push for this on the NHS . Why?

I do think co payments would help, even small means tested ones. They would remind patients and doctors that the patients are the customers and should be treated with care, compassion and decency, and not with a superior paternalistic attitude.

It just wasn’t thought was it. The longest you waited for a GP appointment under Tony Blair was 48 hours. Imagine being able to get a doctors appointment in 48 hours now and then imagine complaining about it https://twitter.com/centralbylines/status/1583211455427534855?s=46&t=uOQXADF4p4GXMYws_32gVg we didn’t know we were born.

Anyone saying its nothing to do with the present government are either tories themselves or totally naive.
Of course its to do with the present government. They want to run the nhs into the ground and sell it off.

spot on about accountability.

and so many bristle at the idea of privatisation, but the reality is that with the current woeful state of service, privatisation is inevitable. Anyone who can afford to now looks to private care where possible, and I just see that process accelerating to a point where nhs is last resort rather than first port of call. The big gap for private is emergency care, but I can see that changing in more affluent areas (many such private emergency care centres exist in nyc for example)

Alternatively we could embrace privatisation and shape it so that we balance individual and societal needs, but I just don’t see a political will.

Most people now realise that they can’t just rely on the state pension.

When will they understand that they can’t just rely on the state for their health.

The reason you have to push is lack of resources.

Every issue comes down to lack of resources. 13 years of deliberate underfunding is why we are here.

Labour put the cash in from 97 onwards. It improved.

UK health spending has fallen behind comparator nations - and the waste on e.g. agency staff because more and more won't stay.

Privatising won't help at all. What we need is a change of government.

@cactiminds and you think 48 hours is acceptable? I think that is what the op means about collective derangement about the state of the nhs. A more apt analogy might be a frog in boiling water.

I moved to the UK in 2008, having lived in a variety of first and third world countries, any by far my worst medical experience was London in 2008-9. It was shocking, even in comparison to ER visits in China.

yes, it is worse now, but we were careening over the cliff well before 2010

YANBU.

I also think the OTT “unsung heroes” attitude and moronic clapping during COVID didn’t help. We’ve elevated (sometimes incompetent and dangerous) staff to sainthood levels and it’s utterly bizarre.

I love that a PP thinks voting labour will solve the problem. The UK was a very different place when we were under Labour last time. We have too many people, too many public health problems, too few resources and a system utterly unfit for purpose.

I don’t agree with privatising but there has to be a middle ground where the talent of innovative medical can help alleviate problems whilst still retaining the “free at point of service” model.

The problem is also you are not allowed to criticise the 'wonderful NHS' when a lot of the time it is pretty bad, and not a great service.
The NHS is no longer what it was set up for, medical science had developed so much and we want to offer the extras like IVF and cosmetic procedures. I think we have to seriously reconsider how it is funded and what is funded. It is no longer a service just to keep ppl in work which is what it was set up to do.

Don’t the German government pay more per capita into the healthcare system. So if you want a German system then the government will need to increase funding. Otherwise you’ll just end up with an underfunded German system.

Well UK pensions are a separate piece of shit, but privatising healthcare would help I guess as plenty of us would die much earlier.

I don’t personally think full privatisation is the answer.

Private care works brilliantly for those who can afford it and, often, for relatively minor conditions. It is less effective for complex conditions which require multidisciplinary teams. To achieve this, we would end up with costs similar to the U.S.

But many in the continent use hybrid systems which are affordable and deliver high quality healthcare.

We need to accept, however, that the current model has run its course and is no longer fit for purpose.

Maybe if rest of UK stopped voting fucking Tory......

I partly agree with this.

The concept of a completely free healthcare system where nobody pays anything worked fine in 1948 or whenever it was launched. It doesn't work now. The whole system needs to be reformed and throwing loads of extra money at it just will not work. The reason the French system is superior is because people who can take out insurance (or their employers do) and only people who can't afford to pay have their policies paid for by the state. Similar to Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia - anywhere that isn't the UK.

It's not about "running it to the ground" - the concept of the NHS just isn't working any more but it will take a very brave politician to stand up and say so, given so many people think of it as a sacred cow.

I think there is pretty much no policy area that wouldn't be improved by getting rid of the Tories.

There is shit in the rivers, school buildings falling down, no police response, crumbling roads - we can all see the deliberate destruction.