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.

I am not tory voter but i find people latching on the idea of "vote labour, NHS will be better" quite frankly, naive.
While change in leadership is absolutely needed, again, repeating that NHS was well known abroad for its failings pre 2010.
Hence why many of us risked to be caught having health insurance still running in another eu country. Especially women's health. My gynecologist highly unofficially recommended keeping the insurance.

Voting Labour won't make any difference. The country is financially broken. Even if there was more money, there are some real showstoppers

There are not enough doctors and nurses so no matter how much money there is, they are not there to pay, unless we steal more from developing countries who have trained them with limited resources

The useless managers as a previous poster said, usually a nurse promoted because they are a good nurse, not a leader.

Until this country and politicians stop reciting this false mantra that we have the best health service in the world, we won't more forward and realise it is awful. Only have to look at France, Spain and Germany to realise theirs are all better

No but I think we are with Tory governments. They always completely us yet we still vote them in!

Insufficient money has led to poor working conditions due to over-burdened staff, leading to staff leaving, creating a vicious spiral... to the point that the staff left can be crap and unprofessional because the system is too overwhelmed to manage it.

It's a broken system... Significant extra money isn't a silver bullet that will sort the issues, but it's a start, but it needs a proper workforce strategy that recognises the chronic i lack of staff and addresses that. It's a Herculean task though, and even with massive investment it would take a decade or more to make a real difference things are so broken.

@Newbutoldfather

Most people in this country do not have an extra £100 per month to pay for co payment insurances.

The point you seem not to recognise is that with 150k of staff shortages and many posts filled with anonymous bank/agency works, you wont get the care and without significant extra funding you wont get the scanners you say you want for all.

Then there is Social Care or rather the lack of it, 99% privatised but down here in Cornwall, its the NHS that is having to fill the gaps that the private sector cannot fill with community care, yep, hospitals sending out HCPs to do what the private have failed to provide.

France and Germany both spend per capita far more than the UK and have done for decades, in the case of Germany, they have almost double the number of Nurses/AHPs.

Adding in a whole host of private companies, all wanting to make a profit, to provide an extra 30% of funding, will not prove to be efficient.

Break the people beak the system

The tories don't want an nhs - it's not profit making which is horrific to them - but they know the public do so they had to break the nhs

Which they have almost managed to do

Too few staff , overworked beyond exhaustion- they are humans not robots - in an emotionally demanding job from which they can never recover - measured on productivity not caring

Try labour it's your best shot

reading overnight replies. It does seem that I am not wrong judging by the close to 4:1 vote in favour of the question.

For what it is worth a few of my ideas would be:

Pay staff what they are worth (especially nurses).

Get rid of the nursing degree bar for a few specialist nurses. It is not really a degree (look at the A levels required to get on the course) and merely means nurses start their career in debt. It also seems to have made nurses process-focused rather than patient focused. In my week in hospital with my son, I saw a couple of genuinely nice nurses, most who really didn’t care and one who was downright cruel.

Give more money to a dramatically restructured NHS, but money is not a panacea. I think research showed that, of every £10 Labour pumped into the NHS, £3 went to improved NahS and £7 was wasted in health service inflation.

Introduce means-tested co payments. This would both stop time wasting by patients and make the staff and patients realise who the clients are.

Encourage well qualified medical staff to take more management roles by making them more flexible and making sure that those in the know were really the most important in the decision making process.

However, I do think we need to stop encouraging people to stop accepting where we are. In two threads recently, one breast-feeding mother was told she was ridiculous for not packing a picnic before taking her seriously I’ll child to hospital and another was told she should pop out to a shop to buy paracetamol for a child in agony with a fracture. Utterly ridiculous in the UK.

Truely Private care does not work brilliantly

The majority will get much worse care and the rich get over medicalised

Pay staff what they are worth (especially nurses)

What are they worth?

Get rid of the nursing degree bar for a few specialist nurses. It is not really a degree (look at the A levels required to get on the course) and merely means nurses start their career in debt. It also seems to have made nurses process-focused rather than patient focused. In my week in hospital with my son, I saw a couple of genuinely nice nurses, most who really didn’t care and one who was downright cruel

Almost every country in the Western world has nursing as degree qualification or a similar uni/college type qualification & if you have one of the previous systems, you need even more qualified staff to provide the "on the job training" they will need.
My Mums training took 3 years, became a ward sister and after doing a Return to Nursing course in the 80s found that nursing had changed so much in the preceding 20 years.

Nurses with a degree never used to enter the nhs with debt, who took away the Bursary?

Its not about "Accepting where we are" it about accepting that providing health care requires long term investment in staff, equipment and infrastructure... and lot of it, not more Spires and Bupa's.

Most countries don’t have an NHS, they have private healthcare paid for by insurance with a minimal service through the government. The NHS was never meant to cope with the scale of people it is trying to help now, and with all the range of meds and illnesses.
too many people taking out and not putting in. I have known people having their sixth child without ever working a day or paying tax, and sadly this is what overburdens the health service in the end. It’s a bottomless pit and we need to accept that very sadly it no longer works and needs scrapping for an alternative . People are dying on pavements waiting for
ambulances - we need an alternative to the unsustainable shit show.

I disagree with taking away nurses degrees but any medical degree should come with a bursary.

Personally I think there needs to be a complete change in mindset from the NHS. Currently they seem to treat the current symptom instead of finding the cause. My mom and dad were both mis diagnosed due to this and by the time their cancers were diagnosed it was to late, they wouldn't even offer my dad chemo because there was no point yet they wasted over 20 weeks trying to treat individual symptoms/ waiting for scans. Recently a friend has been diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer but was told multiple times it won't be cancer your too young.

@GPTec1 ,

Money alone won’t solve the culture problem.

I am not a fan of pure private either and our few world-class hospitals are wonderful (at least partially thanks to massive funding campaigns).

However, if you spend any time in a hospital you realise that everything is now based on IT. Great, except it never works and just means people won’t pick up a phone or a bleeper to solve a problem (such as sorting out pain relief for a child in serious pain).

I think the narrative of ‘great people in a fucked up underfunded’ system is only true up to a point. The people are potentially great, but right now they aren’t, because they are poorly managed in a process rather that patient-centric system. Again, I have met wonderful exceptions, the nurses who stay to chat and empathise with a child in pain, the A&E doctor who helped me find my car, the senior consultant who helped me get a coffee when he saw I was utterly exhausted. However, these seemed like the exceptions rather than the rule.

More money is not the sole solution and neither is going fully private, but we need to do something.

The it never works because it costs to get good it and no one will sign off anything but the cheapest

Yes once you have trashed the staff if takes more than money to recover

Putting a government in place that supports you would be a good start though

The system is flawed because the tories made it about money not people so that's what the nhs had to do - continually prove how cost effective they were which diverts resource and minds form the real issues or patient care

Despite that - for the nurses and doctors reading this - huge swathes of the nhs still manage a brilliant job

It's complex and I work within the NHS so see all sides.

The government campaign during early covid to 'protect the NHS' didn't help because it created the idea that the entire NHS was on the verge of collapse and the public seemed to think every NHS worker was working back to back shifts under immense trauma.

And some were. Many were working from home though, or working shifts in virtually empty hospitals and taking home carrier bags full of donated food coming from well-wishers. By the time covid really hit those areas which was months into the pandemic, the public was losing patience and expecting the NHS to get back to normal. By which time, there was an enormous backlog of 'usual service' appts which will take years to deal with.

So you have a multitude of services which essentially shut down for months but still had to pay all the staff then trying to catch up so staff are then overwhelmed, stressed out, going off sick or leaving so then it's a vicious cycle where the remaining staff come under more stress and then go off sick or leave.

And through all this, there are still a not insignificant number of people who take the piss and complain about waiting lists and lack of appointments available but still don't turn up when they get one. Most services run at 10-20% DNA rates so when that amount of people aren't attending, the clinic time is wasted and has a knock on effect for waiting lists.

We do indeed need to do "something"

But imho it would be thoughtful but significant investment, in staff, equipment and buildings, more it not less.

I asked my DD, when it all works well, why is that? she replied "Staff, when we have full teams in, everything just works, we have time to speak to patients, read notes, go to patient focused meetings"

The issue is that the only way they get full teams in is by taking staff from other wards.. Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.

However, because of neglect, it is a 10 year + plan to fix.

People in the UK do not have enough money to pay the current tax burden and then pay a top up insurance on top of that, also why would BUPA etc pour billions extra into the NHS for no return for 10 or more years? and if they did, they'd want large returns, guaranteed profit.

Co payments is another way of queue jumping.

Yes, I agree. My DS had sepsis as a newborn and the second doctor only looked at him because he was my second so it wouldn't have been first time mum anxiety. Within minutes all hell broke lose but what an awful thing to have told a person.

Same DS is now 6 and being horrifically failed by the NHS. I've had just about enough of it and have paid £2550 to access some form of care privately. I can't actually afford this, I've had to borrow and save for months.

I'd be very supportive of a better system, even if we have to contribute. My fear with an American mindset it would be used to fleece us but a European style system would be far better.

I’m not sure European type models do much differently with lower earners.

It’s usually the case higher earners use healthcare less but pay more for everyone else.

In non US models I think there may be state cover for lowest earners. If you look at who pays for prescriptions here it’s a fairly small percentage as so many are eligible.

You either make high users pay more by linking to healthcare needs or high income pay more by not. The former would just mean they can’t afford healthcare.

But on all these threads when I read the government are underfunding then what next?

Who pays more? And how much. I suppose people think Labour will get some to pay more, but someone else not them personally.

We are getting older and living longer with complex issues, including new body parts required - who pays for that?

Thank you. I think you are right that I should seek mental health support. I get something similar to a panic-attack whenever I think back to that A&E trip and the surrounding days. I get that roller-coaster lurch in my stomach, the heart rate goes up and I start crying if I'm talking to someone. And then it's all wrapped up in that "but I should be grateful I'm alive" gift paper.

So much of trauma could be avoided (and I'm thinking back to the birth of my child too) if the NHS wouldn't be so shit with pain-management. It's awful to feel every second of your own slow, painful near-death!

Dd said the nurses on her ward were unbelievably lazy - she's assuming that's from burnout. Noone bothering to get anything a patient asked for (elderly acute care and end of life), and telling dd to sit down and not bother when she was bustling around getting things patients had asked for. One very frail lady asked several times for a teaspoon to eat her lunch as she couldn't face a fork and large spoon. Nurses just laughed about it and left her, so she sat there crying and not eating until dd got her a teaspoon and then she was so grateful.

Thank god dd isn't going into nursing as I'd hate to think that caring side of her would be destroyed.

The problem is we are paying off the massive Covid debts right now, taxes are going up because the tax thresholds have been frozen.

The NHS really needs a massive amount of money spent on it but where is it going to come from?

I’m sure not all are the same but geez that’s sad

On under funding and who pays? as correctly identified and the aging point too.

The Govt wasted £21billion in covid fraud, money that will never be recovered.

Normal fraud in Govt accounts for around £5 billion per year & we have low levels of CGT especially on stocks & shares.

We are currently spending over 100 billion on a train track to save 20mins.

We either accept the current and awful NHS or we find the money to change things but we will never attract foreign companies to the UK unless they believe their workers can get prompt healthcare

Totally agree with this.

I agree that’s it’s insulting and slightly Kafkaesque that people brush the absurdly long waits under the carpet. It’s impossible to raise an issue with the quality of care in the NHS without the caveat “but I love our wonderful NHS workers”. People think you’re a monster and a Tory if you say anything bad. The caveat about “our wonderful doctors and nurses” is like having to cross yourself in church or the way behave in North Korea after anyone says something wrong about one of the Kims.

There was a thread on here this week about the phone system at GPS offices and how fucking lamentable it is that it’s impossible to get through to a surgery on the phone for a couple of hours after it opened in the morning and people were actually saying: “but if you don’t have an urgent health issue you shouldn’t need to see a doctor”. As if it’s OK that many people have no confidence of actually getting access to a GP. We shouldn’t have to justify our need to see a GP.

Literally the point of the NHS is that it’s free and accessible to all at the point of care. Not that it’s ocassionally accessible after taking four hours off work to sit on the telephone or 10 hours in an urgent care centre but day to day health issues should be dealt with over the phone (also after a four hour triage which involves taking a half day off work).

We have been so ground down and gaslit by this Third World level of service that we think it’s normal. It’s fucking not normal.

You have the nhs people voted for

Sort of because of course the government doesn't actually need a majority to vote it in