Health care is a postcode lottery

[Beeches24]

I know there's issues with money and funding etc. but just let me be upset for the moment that the health care you receive all depends on your postcode.

I got an urgent referral for something specific and my appointment is 4 weeks away. Another trust says for this particular referral that they see you in 3 days.

I saw a post on here where someone went to a particular hospital for treatment and they were going to recommend a certain procedure but when they realised the patient lived in a different trust they wouldn't be eligible to receive it.

Even the tests offered vary by trust. Is someone more deserving of treatment dependent on the trust their area is covered by?

It has to do with how funding is managed by individual trusts and commissions. On paper, it is supposed to reflect the needs of each area but it also means that some trusts are overloaded while others have services with capacity. I haven't worked for the NHS when they had centralised funding so can't say if this system is any better than the previous one. Ideally, we should be able to collaborate. Pragmatically, I think this will mean more bureaucracy, another layer of management and I don't think it is achievable without a unified records system.
We see quite a number of out of area patients in our service and we have to be commissioned separately by each referring trust and paid for a certain number of patients. For example, one of the trusts pays us to see 8 patients a month from their borough which is a figure they estimated and may or may not reflect the actual need. After accepting 8 patients, we have to close our books for the rest of the month. And we have no access to their health records which is a real pain.

I am waiting on 2 referrals, one is for Orthopaedics, I had a call to say there are no NHS appointments available to book and the other is ENT, no idea how many weeks wait that will be

When I qualified in the early nineties we studied the Black report( rejected by the conservative government) from 1980 which demonstrated the postcode lottery and showed that inequalities had been widening since the beginning of the NHS ….certainly nothing much has changed ,poorer people experience both lesser access to healthcare and worse health overall, and now you even get different care decided at a governmental level according to which country of the UK & N.I. you live in.

Same as ivf

I would have been given one go - tho lost as dh had children /adults in their 20's. I had none

But my friend living -around 7mes away had 3 cycles on nhs