What are your thoughts on privatising the NHS? Good or bad?

[Supernova23]

I would also love some input from those who have lived in countries that have private healthcare systems. Is it better or worse in your country?

For context, I love the prinicple of the NHS. I’m an NHS nurse. I also like a massive chunk of NHS nurses and doctors, think of looking for a way out on a daily basis. The lure of going abroad tempts me daily.

But as we know, we live on a tiny over populated island. People are living longer and getting sicker. People also abuse the system on a daily basis. I’ve been kicked, hit, spat at, called every name under the sun. I’ve been threatened numerous times. Me and my colleagues have been threatened by a maniac with a machete.

We are haemorrhaging staff on a daily basis. People either leave or go off long term sick. I can’t blame them.

Patients are becoming more medically complex with multiple co morbidities. In the nicest possible way, advances in medicine has meant that people who would have kicked the bucket long ago, are now people kept alive due to modern medicine. People are also getting much, much larger; this makes them more complex to manage in every sense. Even with basic bog standard care. We frequently have patients so large it takes at least 4 people reposition them. You try finding 4 spare hands on the wards; it’s a nightmare.

In my hospital alone, every single ward has multiple complex long stay patients that have been on the wards for 6+ months. In some cases it’s a year or more. The cost of these stays often runs into the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, and is obviously reducing the number of patients we can admit.

I could ramble on. The system has been at breaking point for years. Would privatising the NHS improve it? Or is that cloud cuckoo land?

@SadOrWickedFairy

How about not expecting them to wait hours and hours for an appointment they have turned up on time for?

Or like us when we had to travel over 90 minutes to see a specialist and transplant coordinator in a different hospital as the first stage in a stem cell transplant procedure.

Appointment time was for 9.30, so it was an early start and we both had to take a day off work. Turned up on time. Waiting room absolutely jam packed. Not good for an oncology department where most would be immunocompromised due to cancer/chemotherapy etc. Quickly transpired it was one of "those" situations where everyone was given the same appointment time and just expected to wait.

Around 11.00 OH went to reception desk to ask how much longer - she just shrugged and said they were busy! At around 12.00 we went down the corridor to find one of the HCAs who were occasionally taking someone through to another waiting area to see if she could at least tell him where he was in the queue, she couldn't and just told him the oncologists decided on the running order and we just had to wait.

By 1.00 the waiting room was virtually empty and even the receptionist had gone for her lunch. So he went down the corridor again to find it deserted. They'd all gone for lunch and just left the patients in the waiting room.

He waited in the corridor until people started coming back, luckily it was a consultant who came back first, not the one he was due to see, and he said he'd try to find out what was happening. By this time the waiting room was filling up again with patients, all of whom seemed to have been given the same 2pm appointment. Eventually the consultant came to find us to tell us the consultant we were due to see had gone for the day as he only worked mornings, and that the transplant co-ordinator never works that day, she always had Wednesday's off, and to be fair to him, did apologise profusely and said we should never have been given a Wednesday appointment and that it was an admin cock-up, and even more of an admin cock up that no one bothered to tell us when we arrived!

Waste of a full day, just down to shambolic NHS admin.

Yep, similar with my OH and his cancer. He had loads of tests at first, including blood tests, skeletal x-ray, MRI scans and bone marrow sample. Then all needed doing again a few months later when he was transferred to a different hospital, same Trust! Exactly the same results which was hardly surprising!! Second hospital claimed they had to do their own because it "wasn't easy" to get the results from the first hospital sent over to them!!

The reason many Americans are so resistant to nationalised healthcare is the stories they hear about the nhs. As an American living in the UK if I had only two systems to choose from I would choose the US every day of the week over the NHS. The US system places a great deal of financial risk on the individual, but I never worried about whether I could see a doctor or get treatment when I needed it. The standard of care that people seem to accept here (as in what people here think good looks like when the nhs more or less works) is frankly appalling by us standards without even getting into the horror stories of what it is like when it isn’t working.

fortunately we don’t have to take one or the other - as many point out there are a multitude of other private- state hybrid systems out there, some of which work very well.

i do think healthcare in the uk is headed for greater privatisation no matter what and the choice is between taking control to shape that in a way that is coherent and works for the greatest number of people or we continue to ignore it politically and let the market sort itself out.

American service personnel and their families should not be using the NHS unless for emergency treatment. The American government should be paying for private health care

You don't have to use the NHS. You could choose to have private health care

I have lived as a child and adult in the U.S. and hate the system here and love the NHS but would support a European or Australian model in order to save it.

There are invariably howls of outrage if there’s ever a suggestion that ‘free at the point of use’ is no longer viable, yet at the same time many people like so stress how much better care is in other European countries.

My Swedish friend tells me that in Sweden everybody pays something for prescriptions, and for visits to the GP or A&E, and pays towards the ‘board’ element of hospital stays. All relatively small amounts, and there’s an annual cap on prescription costs.

And Sweden is popularly supposed to be something of a socialist Utopia. Can you imagine the outrage if any such measures were introduced here? Not that they ever will be - I doubt that any government of whatever colour would have the guts - they’d be too worried about the other lot saying they’d do away with it - and losing power at the next GE.

You couldn't use private health care for many conditions in much of the UK. Possibly you could in London. There is no private maternity/cancer / cardiac surgery etc where I live.

Just read the OP, and I can well believe all you say, up until the suggestion that privatising the NHS would somehow improve the service - how? I'm always mystified at this: can someone explain how they think the NHS would be improved by privatisation and also provide even just one example where an essential service has been improved by being privatised? And how would it work for those who can't afford private healthcare? A multi-tier system perhaps with lower quality or no care for the poor? 👌

My opinion is that privatising essential services resulting in any improvement is a myth perpetrated by the greedy and gullible.

@Flopsythebunny and I generally do use private wherever possible. Unfortunately at the moment it is a bit of a patchwork - my daughter needs treatment and there are no specialists within 100 miles that treat children privately for example. If I had a medical emergency I would have to be treated in an nhs hospital.

eventually the market will sort out private options for those who can afford it as demand grows- look at the rise in private gp services in past 5 years and private emergency services opening in London. At the moment, though, I am terrified by the thought of someone in the family needing urgent care.

No to privatisation. Once you have shareholders and profit to be made it'll all get very expensive

@meimei80 if you bother to read the thread you will find numerous examples of improved service when nhs treatment is contracted out to private companies like specsavers.

That's utterly appalling and unforgiveable, that is NO way to treat people, yet will still have some posters on here justifying it.

The NHS is not a world class health service it is not even close.

My apologies, trying to work and not having the time to scrutinise 11 pages of posts!

So you think because it works with Specsavers it would work to privatise all NHS service, such as maternity services etc...OK

And that's before we start on his monthly battle to get his chemotherapy drug package which usually takes several phone calls being passed between depts until he finally gets someone who will take responsibility. Every sodding month. Two weeks ago, he turned up for his pre-agreed appointment at the oncology dept to pick up his drug package after spending most of the day beforehand checking it had been issued, approved, etc., and ready for collection, only to be told after waiting for an hour in the oncology reception area that they couldn't find it! They're absolutely hopeless!

@meimei80 if you are genuinely interested in having a dialogue then you need to do your part and actually read some of what people are contributing.

had you done so you would realise that no one is proposing 100% privatisation.

This.

So you think because it works with Specsavers it would work to privatise all NHS service, such as maternity services etc...OK

Have you read the report just out on the appalling standard of maternity care in the NHS? Forgotten about all the other maternity care scandals across the NHS? Do you seriously think a private provider could be worse?

No-one is saying totally privatise the NHS but it needs complete reform it is not viable as an entity in it's current form.

Indeed. I only use my NHS GP for repeat prescriptions. Anything else I see a GP privately. Clearly GPs like private provision as so many are now switching to it. If it's so bad I wonder why they are jumping on the bus.

The receptionists at my GP practice are unhelpful and rude and take 25 minutes to answer the phone. The GPs are peremptory, superior and don't listen. I wonder why that doesn't happen when I book a private appointment? Oh wait, it's because I'm paying therefore customer service and basic courtesy are essential - or guess what, I won't pay the bill.

My tax bill last month for PAYE and NICs was about £2,300. My BUPA premium is £302 pcm. I do of course appreciate that not all of my deductions reach the NHS but I bet significantly more than £302pcm does.

@RosesAndHellebores I completely agree with you about the cost of poorly organised care to patients. Also consider waiting lists where people might be off work waiting for treatment.
Hidden costs like these should be factored into what the current model of care costs. But they are not. We shouldn't have to put up with them.

Absolutely. If people are off work long term they will lose their jobs. They will then stop contributing. It is basic common sense to keep people in work.

An efficient NHS leads to better health

In theory yes, but I'm not even convinced of that any more

As said, we seem to have stumbled into a position where the idea that everything's for someone else to sort out has become so entrenched that a "better" NHS may well be regarded as licence for yet more self indulgence

And that's cultural, so how we'd even begin to address it is anyone's guess - though somehow I doubt throwing money at it is any kind of answer

Clearly GPs like private provision as so many are now switching to it. If it's so bad I wonder why they are jumping on the bus

It's surely not so much that they're "jumping on the bus" as that they never got off it, considering that GPs are contracted by the NHS rather than directly employed by it - and that's not even allowing for those like my ex GP who happily took NHS money and sold private appointments on it's time

It's worth remembering that many didn't even want the NHS in the first place and had to be sweetened out of their purely private and very lucrative practices - an attitude which seems to have not died

I agree but I don't pay my NHS GP, they are paid by the NHS which commissions their services. My GP and their NHS staff think they are doing me a favour.

Right, 11 pages on and I have only seen one poster providing an 'example' of this wonderful improvement from privatising a service: the poster whose family members benefitted from a privately provided free NHS service!! So if the whole system was privatised these people would have had to cough up for those services - how much, I wonder? Would the service have been value for money and still been good quality?

What I'm asking about is please provide an example of where a system providing essential services has been privatised and where this has resulted in an improved experience for the user in terms of better service, value for money etc.

I don't think you can.

And for the poster who claimed energy and water: hahahahahahahahaha!