To feel angry at celebrating the NHS

[TaylorSwifting]

The NHS is falling apart and today people are all full of glee at the NHS yippee 75 years today, it’s making me so angry!!!!!!!!!
My family member has been diagnosed with cancer, 2 months down the line and has had no treatment and terrible delays for tests…..still yet to see an oncologist. 2 months!!!!!!!!! Family member only has pain management because us family have begged and fought to get it. It is an utter disgrace and I had no idea how bad things were until this awful diagnosis in our own family.
We are not alone / it hasn’t been a mistake or being lost in the system by accident! Record high cancer patient delays - this is what so many people are facing. I am in utter disbelief!
I won’t be celebrating today.

An 86 year old woman with dementia is extremely unlikely to get medical insurance at any price and the cost would be considerably north of £200 a month if any insurer would take her on. Someone like her should be prioritised for appointments.

I don't why people see fit to celebrate this with all the health workers' strikes that are going on at the moment!

You know when someone writes exactly how you feel, better than you could have yourself? Brilliant post!

Also off topic but excellent username @TrixieFatell 🤣

Well, if everybody else takes out private medical insurance, they’ll be more appointments available for her, won’t there?

Not sure about being a priority though

Why thank you 😄

Why wouldn’t she be a priority? At her age with dementia she’ll be frailer and sicker than 90% of the practice’s patients.

Several examples spring to mind, firstly, an elderly lady who lives at the end of our road, who, honest to goodness never leaves the house I have never seen the woman in daylight. She must be 85. Next week she’s going into hospital for some sort of heart operation. If the woman survives, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle. But I’m sorry if I was 85 I would be refusing to go through that level of treatment. What is actually the bloody point ?

What an attitude! My DF had a new aortic valve fitted at 86, it gave him three years of a really good quality life. If he hadn't had it done he might still have lived another three years (his death wasn't heart related) in deteriorating health, with multiple trips to hospital. What does it matter if the elderly lady leaves the house or not? It is possible to enjoy life from your own home - and if she is having a heart procedure she must have left the house at some stage surely, there will have been testing involved, probably quite a lot of it. Do you sit at your window all day looking to see if she goes out?

And this is why theres no money in the pot for younger people. How dare he take 3 more years when 40 year olds dont have the opportunity. Disgusting

Why do people keep telling people whose family members were killed by medical negligence to be grateful they didn’t get sent a bill? WTF. So if I run over someone with my car, they should thank me for not charging them? It’s not even the only option so it’s such a fake choice (apparently USA is the only other country in the world) but even if those were the only 2 options I think most decent people would choose for their family member to be alive with a bill than murdered for free!

OP (and everyone that agrees with the sentiment):
What do you think would happen if your organisation tried to do the same job with 25% less staff than was needed?

I don’t know that the ‘hero worship’ was particularly helpful but for god sake please don’t blindly join in the subsequent NHS bashing that has been so obviously whipped up by the right wing media at the behest of the Tory party who want to see the NHS dismantled and bring in private healthcare organisations in which they and their rich mates are shareholders.

My friend works in NHS HR and says the amount of money wasted on temporary staff due to full time staff taking extended sick leave for made up reasons is astronomical. She says the problem is you can’t sack anyone for poor performance.

PrincessTigger · Today 05:41
Why do people keep telling people whose family members were killed by medical negligence to be grateful they didn’t get sent a bill?

This. Who cares if it's supposedly free to all if "all" can't get the care. Those of you who haven't had to pay thousands and thousands for treatment - that's great for you but doesn't help all the people who weren't able to acces treatment till it was too late (or at all)

Did you miss the fact that he would have had multiple further trips to hospital without a new valve? That was the reason the procedure was done after his third hospital visit as a doctor could see it happening again and again. Would you rather he be killed off so he didn't have to be a drain on the health service? Given that he started his working life at 14 I think he had more than contributed his fair share of taxes. If anything is "disgusting" it is you.

Anyway he hasn't taken anything from "the pot" - we don't live in the UK. Our own health system is in enough of a crisis of its own, but thank goodness not as bad as yours.

@PrincessTigger
You make it sound like there is no such thing as medical negligence in private healthcare.

You know what happens if a private doctor or nurse makes a mistake? They get held accountable, they have to explain themselves to someone, things change, they might even have to pay compensation. The culture of worship (people were literally presenting baked offerings to the NHS god this week), belief in its infallibility, refusal to take responsibility and always cast the blame elsewhere, cover-ups, ganging up against patients, refusing to listen, seeing sick people as a burden - all of these things are intrinsic to the NHS and are why it will never improve and people will continue to die unnecessarily.

@PrincessTigger
You know what happens if a private doctor or nurse makes a mistake? They get held accountable, they have to explain themselves to someone, things change, they might even have to pay compensation.
Ridiculously ignorant post. You know absolutely NOTHING about how the NHS works.

Go and do some fucking research about how the NHS deals with deaths, serious incidents, near misses, never-events and negligence and then come back on this thread.

Unfortunately I do and have had to endure the way the NHS closes ranks and then I had to hear in an inquest that the NHS did not consider the lives it took to be important

I’ve sat through 2 inquests, my gran & my friend’s mum, both killed in horrific ways by medical negligence (in the latter, she literally drowned in her own blood on a ward). The NHS even admitted it was avoidable in both cases but that they didn’t matter as they both had terminal cancer. I had to listen to that! They made so many mistakes (wrong person doing the procedure, inadequate training, failure to get a translator, failure to get consent, failure to call for help early enough) but absolutely nothing changed as a result of either case so they will happen again and again and again and again.

This is the EXACT PROBLEM. Anyone who has a shitty experience is either stupid or right wing or we just don’t understand blah blah blah. Nothing ever changes, people continue to be killed unnecessarily, and the people who prevented change from happening slap themselves on the back.

Why so aggressive? The Guardian has reported that whistleblowers are routinely vilified in the NHS.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/02/nhs-whistleblowers-need-to-be-better-protected-by-the-law-says-bma

@Lacucuracha
because the poster is suggesting this is the case:

The …… belief in its infallibility, refusal to take responsibility and always cast the blame elsewhere, cover-ups, ganging up against patients, refusing to listen, seeing sick people as a burden - all of these things are intrinsic to the NHS

She also suggests nothing changes when serious incidents happen. I cannot begin to tell you how ignorant and sweeping that statement is - NHS spend thousands of hours each week spent on governance, safety systems, data analysis, investigations, follow-ups…there is a duty of candour to patients and relatives…fault is accepted in many circumstances…medical professionals are disciplined etc.

things were not always this way (look at mid-staffs) but there have been enormous systemic changes in attitudes and cultures since then.

(but oh here’s an article……)

we desperately need a different type of healthcare in this country. Not universal free healthcare for everyone. It's going to take a prime minister with balls of steel to try to modernise and improve our current provision though. So we'll splutter on as we are for a few more decades I've no doubt..

If the public, the papers, and some politicians weren’t celebrating the nhs right now the government would have already stuck the knife in and completely dismantled it
Celebrating a failing nhs serves a much more important purpose than a bit of clapping, it brings it back up the agenda and into the public eye for a few seconds, it increases the number of people who believe the nhs is vital

Surely graded targets would be better, so say if you miss the 20 week deadline you wouldn't get an 'A' but after that further delays would downgrade from B to C and so on. Otherwise there's no incentive to treat people quickly after the initial deadline.