AIBU to ask if you believe that a labour government will go some way to fixing the NHS?

[TabithaTwitchel]

I'm not a labour voter but I could potentially be persuaded for obvious reasons right now

I'd like to believe a new government could do 'something' to stem the rot in the NHS. But I'm not convinced.

Do you think it will help?

Sadly, its a life long thing that the die-hard voters will just vote for labour because their parents did and their parents b4 that

They are not even worried if someone claims they don't use private health and their blood is in the NHS and then about 72 hours later they get caught with their pants down

No ifs, no buts, just a massive fact!!!

PFI was the only way to get the capital investment needed to create the necessary infrastructure. It’s essentially a public sector mortgage. There was nothing wrong with the principle, the execution was rubbish.

As someone who's late husband was a very heavy user of the NHS between '89 and 2019, when he died, the middle 10 years of that period was far from a golden age if you were a patient. Joined-up care got progessively worse as presumably, everyone focussed on their own targets. Any patient requiring multi discpline treatment was effectively abandoned, and only the sharp elbowed, articulate middle class, idealy with contacts in the NHS to help, could get decent joined-upcare. The decline in joined up care slowed and then stopped in the last 10 years of his life, but it didnt get anywhere near the level it was in '89 to '99. But sure, for the staff I am sure it was a wonderful time. More money, better buildings and less work ;)

To answer the OPs question, now that Labour's manifesto has been published, sadly the answer is no as there is little of substance in there. Which is a real shame and a missed opportunity

Hopefully, they can't do any worse. Jeremy Hunt and his successors have decimated the NHS.

No, it's the equivalent of a sub-prime mortgage and a ludicrous idea. It was not the only way to raise capital. The Government could have borrowed far more cheaply than the private sector, but that debt would have been on the Government's balance sheet. So, they lumbered subsequent Governments with the cost of their spending, rather making the case themselves. We, and the NHS, are poorer as a result of that deceit.

Well, its just as well they didn't, we needed that head room when the Global Financial Crash hit and again with Covid then Ukraine.

PFI repayments are very low, not even a weeks NHS spend per year.

Truss on the hand caused UK rates to spike, trashed gilts, which turn caused govt borrowing to rise far more than our competitors and came close to wrecking FS pension schemes, only saved by raiding DB ones.

...and what did we get for that disaster???

To the OP, no Labour wont fix the NHS or fix Dentistry, their spending plans are just not there to do either.

It'll be re jig the spending but ultimately the Tories have so fucked Labour (actually the UK) by cutting NI that we wont notice much change.

I was staff at that time and left.

i joined a 24 strong 24 hour ward.

one person left, and they refused to let us recruit. 23 people could cover the rota.

then another left, because the rota was tougher. No recruiting.

this went on until I broke. By that time we had 12 people covering the 24 hour ward, often single-handedly.

all the time they were asking us to privatise ourselves. In the end they shut the ward as they didn’t have enough staff. But hey, look at all the money we saved! The ward was an early intervention unit and saved ££££££ keeping patients out of intensive care.

@Tryingtokeepgoing it's painful isn't it when one was at the brunt of poor services after a long labour tenure to be told "it's a load of old bollocking"...

Personally I feel NHS really needs to be lifted out of politics altogether and modernised.. Absolutely still mostly free but we need to tweak lots.
People are dying due to poor care

Absolutely agree with you. Apart from it being a 'golden age' for staff.
We were asked to 'massage' the wait lists so they looked much shorter than they actually were, with lots of pointless targets, form filling and 'bluster' and lots of barriers to providing meaningful care, it was very 'tick box'. And very frustrating for me, who was more interested in providing good care than ticking a managers waiting list box. The regular department visits threatening those who were not 'box ticking'.
We were also in a new PFI hospital. In which everything kept breaking from doors to lifts, repairs were tied to certain contracts and took forever, and so much money was spent on the repayments. My salary as a newly qualified physio was from memory £17k, new staff now start on twice that. So pay wasn't actually very good, and lots of unfilled posts, expensive locums and high turnover.

We need to have the courage to move to a European system. Even the Labour canvasser who came to my door last week agreed with me on that. He was Spanish and raved about how good the Spanish system is.

We've too many people wanting a reducing health service.

GPs have thrown in the towel, retiring earlier here. They're rationed on referrals.

Consultant surgeons rationed because there aren't the theatre staff. Or the money/beds/staff on the wards.

Nurses going on the bank because of a bullying climate within the hospital.

Volunteers being treated badly.

So much is wrong in our health board.

No

it might provide a better service for a while as more more money shall be given but it’s broken it’s needs to be completely reformed

the NHS was really good at one point but those days are long gone we need to let go of this sentimental attachment we have to the NHS

we don’t need an American style heathcare system many European countries have a far superior heathcare system and better outcomes

I guess if you want to see what the NHS under a Labour administration might look like - take a look at how well they are running it in Wales. 'A blueprint for the UK' according to Sir Keir.

Actually this is a key point often not talked about.

the culture within the nhs is toxic. Everyone’s pissed off and frustrated, because they can’t do their jobs effectively with a massive workload and burned out colleagues.

i used to be apprehensive picking up the phone to consult a colleague or make a referral. Because 8/10 you’d get snapped at that they didn’t have time to deal with it or didn’t I know they had 50 patients, or their own referrals to make.

everything changing constantly, no one actually able to make decisions. My boss actually had an utterly fantastic idea that really worked- he hired students for admin work on “cover hours”, so normal rate, similar to a zero hours. Then when all his admin staff wanted school holidays off, were sick, mat leave etc they’d phone a student to cover. Everyone got to take their a/l in the summer break, the students earned a shedload of money in the holidays, no paying for locums, win win. They started covering everywhere, so they’d step in on a&e or clinic reception, do the filing, assist in clinics etc. that got binned when he moved on because management couldn’t be bothered to keep it going. So staff left because the job was less flexible and they were constantly being asked to cover.

so everyone tries to shoulder the load themselves and take the pressure off colleagues but then you burn out as well.

on top of that you’re almost expected to be grateful you get the opportunity to be helping people, and that you’re a saint who is such a wonderful person working for the nhs :clap: and you know you’re not any you hate it, so in a twisted way you’re now also an evil bitch for not wanting to happily sell your soul.

like with all toxic environments you don’t even really realise you’re in it. I left, and my next job the first time I rang someone and said I had a job on, that I thought they needed to know about and be involved in, I was met with a breezy no problem, send the details and we’ll sort it. That was my fuck me moment.

Yes, they will improve recruitment and retention of staff and they will cut waiting times but all that will take years, don't expect miracles overnight.

The NHS is actually a fantastic system, very efficient, very effective. The model doesn't need to change. However, it has been systematically underfunded for years so the public will lose faith in it and they can sell it off to private companies.

There are sections of NHS care that are privatised already and within my field I can tell you they waste a lot of money because they prioritise profit over patient care and need to siphon some money off for the shareholders. In public hands it always prioritises patient care.
The NHS is excellent and with restored funding it can be world class again.

Don't believe the nonsense about it being a broken model, it isn't.
Labour turned it around last time they were in power so I believe they can and will do it again.

Starmer cannot fix the NHS as it’s completely broken!!!!

We need cross party agreement that runs beyond the term of government, in order to achieve the real change that is needed. All of them, across the board, need to look at the bigger picture, not just what is good for promoting themselves

There's so much wrong with the NHS I don't think any one government could improve it in any realistic sense. Whatever changes one party makes another comes along a changes it later. I remember reading a piece in the Economist 25 years ago saying that the Tory health reforms were just beginning to work, when Blair's government arrived and changed them all.

The NHS is too big to be a political football, I think some sort of cross party commission needs to be set up to come up with a real workable strategy, and I think we will have no option but to move to a more European style system and lose the free at point of delivery.

I agree with some of your post in theory, @TonTonMacoute, but IMO it will fail because a czar will need to be paid a humunguous salary to run it -- it would be one of the 10 biggest jobs in the whole world of employment. The individual who would pass selection would expect a support team team of exceptional calibre, who would equally expect to be paid commensurately. Meanwhile the NHS limps from crisis to crisis on the good will of well-meaning and well-intentioned amateurs, who on their day, can do brilliantly with clinical staff who are on their game.

Anecdata, but it happened today and illustrates both the good and the bad in the system. DBIL has a history of back issues. For the last two months (he's 66) he has been in severe and increasing pain. Consulted GP, who in true gatekeeper function, told him to see a physio for treatment, privately. Consulted physio, who refused to treat him (privately) saying he needed an MRI to assess the condition of lumbar spine. DBIL then paid £350 for private MRI and diagnosis, which was that DBIL has a cyst growing in volume between L4 and L5, and affecting everything beneath it, with a risk of double incontinence at best and paralysis from waist down at worst, if it were to burst. So last week, armed with MRI scan and response, DBIL attended A&E. The doctor instantly ordered a repeat scan, which showed rapid deterioration over the five days between scans... critical but not quite enough to be "urgent", requiring near immediate surgery so he was sent home with morphine for two weeks, but told he'd be called back ASAP. At which point, the NHS swung into top gear; he was referred to the spinal team in an Oxbridge hospital, who agreed it was urgent, and he was given an appointment (yesterday) for treatment (today). A 30 minute long procedure under local anaesthetic (very painful and uncomfortable) but apparently completely successful although there's always the possibility of a recurrence.

My point is... that the NHS does work. Some of the world's best researchers, clinicians and surgeons work in it; it's big enough to pioneer breakthroughs, but getting everyday care needs identified quickly enough not to put a person on the long term sick list (and off the tax-paying register) is where we should be focusing the private spend. If I invented "general practice plus" for a fee or health insurance premium for the many and varied occasions when you want medical input that's essentially well-informed diagnostics, we could probably fast track a lot of easily solved conditions back to healthy status and avoid many of the loss of work, time and income. I think this is where European and Australian style co-payment systems work well, by accelerating the pathway to solutions. It's not a magic bullet; there isn't one. You can't make people young and we are an ageing society, but give sensible people an affordable accessible path to the diagnosis, and I do think most would take it.

Truss on the hand caused UK rates to spike, trashed gilts, which turn caused govt borrowing to rise far more than our competitors and came close to wrecking FS pension schemes, only saved by raiding DB ones.

Hang on a minute, I work in investing and this isn't a fair statement. Yes, gilt yields spiked to over 4% under the disaster that was the unfunded mini budget. But they were back to not much more than 3% by November (as PPs have said). And if we're talking pensions, let's not forget Gordon Brown's £10bn a year tax raid.

One of the biggest drivers of bond yields is interest rates. We had inflation hitting a 40 year high (which was an issue across G8 economies) and the Bank of England and The Fed sharply increasing interest rates. We also have an enormous public debt, not helped by many on here wanting more government support during the pandemic. Money isn't free, it has to come from somewhere. Also a salutary lesson for Labour's spending plans if Mordaunt was right and there's near £40 billion unfunded gap.

The NHS is appalling and it's anecdotal but I don't remember these halcyon days. I have a long term chronic condition and I've been an NHS outpatient for over 40 years.

During the Labour years, my waiting time was forged every single time I went (and waited ages). I always book the first appointment of the clinic and the (same) consultant is always at least 45-60 minutes late. Year after year but that's ok as it's 'free'. They may have urgent things that crop up occasionally but it's not a condition that has emergencies and frankly they should be on time or book the clinic to start an hour later. But they don't because 20 odd patients waiting 1-2 hours every clinic is fine.

Mercifully I have private healthcare. I've had a shoulder issue. Online private GP appointment at 8, referral letter by 9 and I saw the surgeon for my first consultation at 2. Decided I wanted an MRI on Wednesday afternoon, booked for 8am yesterday. Results were available for my consultation in the evening. This is how it could be if we looked at the part-pay systems in other European countries.

@blue345 Then you should know that the UK 10yr gilt rate, which is implied Govt borrowing costs is almost 2x that of Germany and 1.4% higher than France.

Thats an awful lot of money we are paying out in interest charges that our competitors are not.

Tories caused this.

Brown stopped the 20% credit paid to FS schemes, which of course was raised by ordinary tax payers that very often did not have a FS scheme.

The Tories never reversed it either.

Part pay or fully tax payer funded does not magic up staff or new hospitals, the UK has been paying less per capita for many years.

European countries pay far more tax than we in the UK do, hence they have better public services, we have traditionally voted for tax cuts, so the Tories main policy for this GE is more tax cuts... not a better/reformed NHS.

European countries pay far more tax than we in the UK do, hence they have better public services, we have traditionally voted for tax cuts, so the Tories main policy for this GE is more tax cuts... not a better/reformed NHS.

I won't get into European yield comparisons as we'll send everyone to sleep.

But I agree with your point - for the first time in 30 years, I'm not voting for the Conservatives as I think the NHS should move to a part-pay model. It's telling that France and Germany don't have an NHS model, which simply can't cope with the demography of much higher numbers and an ageing population.

I still don’t understand why introducing middlemen (insurance companies) to take a cut of the money would improve efficiency or healthcare outcomes. I don’t want an additional layer of bureaucracy or worse still, doctors having to spend time on the phone to insurance companies, trying to persuade them to fund Mr Brown’s hospital transfer or Miss Jones’ elective c-section.

Have you looked up how the European systems work?