We need to start charging for NHS services

[Fragmentedbrain]

£15 for the GP
£20 for A&E
NHS routes to paid-for fast track treatment
Options to pay for nicer rooms

We need to stop putting working people on disability benefits for want of a functioning health service it's barbaric

Prescriptions currently cost around £10 for everyone unless you are exempt

You’ve had 533 gp appts in 2 years??

I dont think it can be eliminated if you are to have a system where people have access to preventative health care. The trouble with fining people who don't turn out to need treatment is that it is often not possible to tell in advance if you are genuinely ill. We are constantly told to go to the doctor with concerning symptoms yet the majority of them turn out to fortunately be harmless.

The way I see it is that to catch the people who need to have treatment you need to see the people who don't as well.

For example, let's say 1 in 100 people with a particular symptom have cancer and the rest don't but the symptoms are similar in everybody. To catch the 1 person with cancer you need to see 100 people with the symptoms. That's not a misuse of the system for the other 99. If you have a system where you are made to feel scared to go to the doctor in case you turn out to be fine and deemed to be misusing the service/charged then you are probably not going to catch those 1 in 100 cases.

So I see the cost of the 'worried well' as part of the overall cost of making sure the unwell get the treatment they need.

I want the NHS to sort out their inefficiencies first.

Why isn't there 1 system that all trusts can access for patient notes and creating appointments? Why are appointment letters reaching people after their appointments? Why can't they see other appointments that someone has coming up? If you are trying to create an appointment for Mr Smith, there is no point giving him one that is at the same time as another appointment or one that is 30 mins after a different appointment at a hospital 2 hrs away.

It would be helpful to have a list of currently prescribed medicines for each patient so that if something needs prescribing l, it doesn't affect pre-existing medications.

Why aren't bed bays barcoded and scanned in when a patient is admitted so that they doctors know where they are located when they need to be seen to?

Why are there trusts? It doesn't help people that you can have an appointment at a local hospital, but if you need a follow-up elsewhere, it will be at a hospital that's really difficult for you to get to because it's in the same trust, even though there is an easier to reach one that does the same types of appointment but you can't go there as it's under a different trust.

Why do GPs insist on giving those with kids appointments at school pick up times, those who work appointments during work hours and those who don't work appointments after work hours? Utter madness...

None of those things are inefficiencies, most of them are failures to tailor the way they operate to patients’ lives. Some of them would involve a massive investment in IT when there’s no money to invest in anything.

We are one of the richest countries in the world. Of course there is money for them to sort out all these basic issues. They just don't want to do it. There is no foresight on wanting to make the country better long term, so they keep doing useless sticking plaster solutions.

If you listened to recent government annpuncemts you'd know that they're changing that so there is a single patient record across the whole of the UK, in the next 1-2 years (obviously it will be developed and in pilot programs across that time) but for full and final implementation. They have also made a new deal with both all the trusts to start doing more texts and emails and a deal with the Post Office so that when letters are sent, they now have a requirement to get them sent in a certain amount of time for the money or they won't get it all.

Plus people choose their own hospitals not mainly, you have the right to choose when you get referred to secondary care so people can choose a hospital further if there's something they prefer about the hospital, so it's rarely up to the individual doctors. The individual doctors can see where a patient is in a hospital, the reason you wouldn't have a specific bed is because patients change wards, and every specific area needs to have a specific amount of beds. The main issue with not being able to see all medication isn't that they can't do it but that it's very difficult - essentially different trusts have different systems, so if you traveled somewhere and ended up in hospital somewhere else- that trusts has to request the records and it's takes a while. Also the reason why people have specific clinics outside of trusts e.g a clinic for FGM, or they need specific treatment like a specialist burns unit etc and different surgeons with different specialisms and subspecialty in a nice area. And finally GPs don't and shouldn't be asking whether you need to pick up or kids or whatever - you know your own schedule so book an appointment when your available - how do they know when you work, what if you do shift work, or you may work part-time. People are adults and should be able to decide when they're available to have an appointment.

This is a good point.

A lot of NHS systems currently basically expect the patient (or their parents/carers) to do their own triage.

Triage is difficult to do well!

Delaying going to the doctor because it's "probably nothing" (but it was serious) is just as problematic as going unnecessarily when it turns out to be trivial.

I had the misfortune of waiting in A&E on a b/h - patients handcuffed to police - get fast tracked, people in fights expecting treatment, an rather obese women eating a greasy unhealthy takeaway ( not really looking after yourself are we? )
Staff being abused - I was told this is the worse time to come as it’s party weekend! I was given co codomol could not be prescribed anything stronger or there will a queue round the block for it!
staff are resigned to self entitled people abusing then and abusing a valuable free service mainly down to their own misuse.

Something needs to be done there are folk who are taking the proverbial.

I see 2 problems with that otherwise sensible suggestion:
1 we pay too much tax relative to what we get in return - it is basically a mandatory collection to prop up poverty that has been driven by bad policies and corruption
2 private healthcare costs in this country are generally extorsionate. Unjustifiably so. For those of you who can compare with European prices you can see what I mean. Why is it that in the UK private healthcare has to be up to 10 times more expensive than in other comparable countries? More corruption and greed and possibly the stealth entry of the greedy american corporations. It is a slippery slope, I don't think anyone with a resemblance of sanity and in the know about the american healthcare system would want to replicate that.

High earners already pay very high taxes. Do they get a reduction if they pay for private healthcare? Not that I advocate that.
How much more you want to flog high earners to support everything in society whilst mobey are misussed and abused?

if only you knew how much money was spent in bad IT systems that were not fit for purpose. Because nobody cares. They pay for bad stuff then they complain that it's not good enough. there is no accountability. waste after waste, they simply don't care. I challenged 3 times why we were paying when the contractor didn't meet their contractual obligations. the response was each time shrugging shoulders and "that is the way it is". the NHS is milked ruthlesly by private companies. without providing value for money and nobody cares, they just ask for more money.

that is anecdotal. let's not generalise. the NHS problems run much deeper.

😂Then it might work as well as our privatised railways and water companies. Oh, hold on a minute …

@JoyfulLife I am a high earner so I’m squeezing myself first here. We don’t have a choice - our demand for health far outstrips the tax we pay (as a country). High earners contributions would go towards emergency care, specialist care etc, but some of the routine stuff would be employer / self-funded.

There is a tonne of waste but we’ve been trying to reduce it for 20 years to no avail. Something else has to give too.

We do charge, it's called Tax.

You sound very judgemental. Given that you were sent away with something you could have got over the counter was your own visit any more valid?
And I'm calling bullshit on the obese woman eating a greasy takeaway, although even if she were she is allowed to seek medical assistance if she needs it.

People being brought in by police do not get fast tracked. I have been taken in by police, and we all had to wait many hours to see anyone. The usual triage rules apply. Yes, it means the police are stuck there for hours too, but no one who comes in with a police escort has chosen that.

People that are injured due to fighting still deserve treatment, and you know nothing about the obese woman eating a takeaway or the reason she was there.

And like a PP said, if you were sent away with painkillers, then did you really need to be there either?

Is this true about asylum seekers?

The 987 programme?

And who was in power since 2010? Labour left the Conservatives a vastly improved NHS when it lost office in 2010. How did the Conservatives return it in 2024? Biggest rise in immigrants in history and biggest cuts, what could possibly go wrong?

It’s people like you who leave the NHS in the mess it is in and do not care of their actions or consequences- in Scotland you are fast tracked - I have seen this - wasting police time another stretched and valuable resource. The obese women stuffing herself with a takeaway is clearly not helping her health.
Get in to fights if you wish as you don’t contribute of any value to society, but why expect free treatment ? FYI I was given painkillers as it was a suspected kidney stone but was referred for an emergency CT the next day. They was nothing A&E could not do (too busy sorting out drunk and abusive people)
Don’t point the finger at asylum seekers - they don’t get any sort of preferential treatment either.

Nice to see the amount of people on here that think poor people should just die.
Or big families that couldn’t possibly afford to pay for every single one of their kids gp appointments.

What if someone had symptoms of something sinister like cancer, but couldn’t afford the £15 GP fee, so they just left it?

Serves them right for being poor or having a young family to pay for, right?

I am so sick of people of a certain age thinking that nobody should get anything when they were all too happy to take whatever they could get when they were raising their own families.
It’s so unbelievably selfish.
Then they wonder why they have a reputation that they then laughably deem as “unfair”.

I hate this world, I really do.
”I’m alright, Jack. Sod everyone else”.

A third problem is that is is the same doctors in private health care, so you are often taking resources away from the NHS when being treated privately.

They do though.

People like me? I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, which can involve the police until a bed in a Place of Safety is found. I had injuries so needed to be seen in A&E.

The fact you immediately jumped to me "wasting police time" just proves how judgemental you are. You have no idea what is going with the other people in A&E.

So what if the obese woman was eating a takeaway? Last time I checked, A&E does not have a cafe so this may have been her only meal for that day. You are only mentioning what she was eating because of her size. And you have no idea why she was there. She might not have even been a patient, and was there with someone who was.

I would bet other people looked at you walking out with a prescription and thought you were wasting time too.