The NHS. We need to fight to keep it.

[Differentforgirls]

My Mil is 87. Last year (around September) she was bleeding from her vagina and went to her GP.

The GP referred her to hospital for tests, which she got quickly.

It was cancerous polyps in her womb so she got further tests to ensure they hadn’t spread and was referred for surgery.

Tonight she has been discharged from hospital after numerous tests over the intervening months and a surgery yesterday (keyhole).

She’ll get follow up treatment too.

All NHS, where she has been treated with dignity, respect and kindness.

It might not be what it was due to cuts but it’s still something we should be proud of.

She’ll celebrate her 88th birthday next month, as an OAP in social housing with nothing but her pension, because of the NHS.

AIBU for thinking the NHS is something to be proud of and fight to keep?

They can’t get any increases in taxation through parliament.

theres’s a cost of living crisis. Many people are really struggling. It’s politically unwise to raise tax rates now but they will probably have to.

in the meantime there are plenty of people who do have money who are not the squeezed middle who will pay extra for healthcare.

pensioners largely don’t pay much tax but are happy (ish) if they have funds to pay for cataract operations etc.

we don’t have a European system but people are largely coming around to the view that in some areas of healthcare nhs treatment is so bad they’ll pay.

even bupa are advertising based on it - get a loan, get the op and get back to work.

But I have consistently said on this thread the intensive care type issues should be covered.

But there are many, many issues day in day out that are not life threatening but eat into the funding - so that when those big things come along, the system is less well equipped to deal with them.

It's no different from home finances: if you go out for dinner every weekend, you will have less to spend on an annual holiday,

I thought you weren't reading my replies 😂

Indeed, I'd rather you didn't reply as you don't seem to be able to debate constructively, or be willing to consider that there are better ways of providing healthcare to patients ;)

FWIW my late husband was a type one diabetic, among other chronic conditions, and our doctor (in France at the time) was appalled at how poor the NHS had been in treating him. And when a hospital in Mumbai provides better treatment and diagnoses than a UK teaching hospital you have to at least consider that something is very wrong...

🤣

Exactly, they are not going to treat him, so why take him for the test, the preparation for the colonoscopy is brutal and for what? Having a camera shoved up your back passage to confirm that he has polyps or cancer and that they aren't going to do anything about it.

Different people have VERY different experiences of the NHS.

Personally, I do think we need to fight to keep it, but we also need to fight for it to be reformed, made more efficient, made more personal so patients are a human and not a reference number, etc.

We can't go on treating it as a religion that is unanswerable to it's users. We can't go on where it's self-serving rather than serving the patients.

IF, it is to continue, then massive sweeping reforms are needed.

My DH has cancer and although he's still alive due to treatment, it's been a hell of a journey trying to navigate gross incompetence at every level within the NHS, from basic admin errors, through to the prescriptions for chemo drugs literally never being ready to pickup at the monthly appointment, through to travelling 2 hours to see a specialist for a stem cell transplant only to find the appointment was wasted because the transplant co-ordinator never worked that day (heaven knows how the appointments clerk didn't notice that one - booking a Wednesday appointment for someone who never works on a Wednesday, through to having to go through a painful bone marrow extraction twice because they lost the results of the first one! It's absolutely pitiful and the staff don't seem to care!

How will it make you feel if I tell you a very wealthy family I know (very wealthy) have been back to their NHS GP about a dozen times to have their warts and fungal toenails treated - all picked up at a luxury ski resort sauna in Switzerland.

It takes up appointments and it takes up funding.

I fail to see how that access to free medical care is dignifying poorer people in the community, just because they could do the same.

Agree. If you really think that the inarticulate, the too sick or in too much pain to advocate for themselves, the non middle classes, the people who are not medics or have no medics in the family or the old are treated the same as those who are not, you’re seriously deluded or watch too many medical series on tv.

Frankly, unless you or people who care about you research everything yourself, fight very hard and kick up a hell of a fuss, you’re pretty much doomed if you get anything serious in large parts of the country. And the CQC itself condemns almost half of maternity units as inadequate!

Oh God, I had that once. I asked for an anaesthetic before it and the nurse said ok, so all the other women asked for one.

They all got one except me because I was breast feeding 😭.

Then when I went in there were a group of students watching. I was mortified.

The nurse said “you’ve had two weans you should be used to embarrassing situations” 🤣

I fully agree.

Only 30 hours?? My MIL was in an A&E corridor on a trolley for 48 hours being ignored, with us having to do shifts to give her water, food and take her to the loo. Niece was sexually assaulted by a drunk whilst she was dozing on a hard chair next to the trolley! MIL finally got put on a ward on the third day and they finally started iv drips etc but she died before they started to take effect.

I am not from the UK and I have found the ‘religion’ of the NHS at best weird and at worst cult like. People have looked at me like the worst person in the world when they said simperingly ‘oh I’m sure the midwives were all lovely’ and I’ve answered ‘some were great - others were absolute rude pieces of shit and my child nearly died from their neglect’ all true statements.

i have known people to have awful care and then refuse to complain because they just love the nhs.

Completely unacceptable care. Coerced consent isn’t real consent. How much more relaxed and respected would a patient feel if asked nicely (not in their presence) if medical students ( limited number) could observe.

You always get people like this! Probably why they’re wealthy.

I was fine with it actually after I got over myself. They need to learn!

People in the UK think be better to go down the USA route. Oh no, god, that would be awful. What folk don't understand that even paying thousands in insurance it does not cover all the treatment. Friend of mine was shot in the leg by ICE agents in LA, despite having full insurance for the whole family, he was $80,000 out of pocket on things the insurance cover won't pay on. It would've been more but luckily his wife is a nurse and could pick up caring.

The NHS at the moment is totally broken. I am in an unfortunate area where the local hospital is in the bottom 10. It shows. For 3 years I've been trying to get help and the waiting list for gynae, ENT and heart is years. It's a scary place to be and the NHS needs fixing, to me, health is everything and the rest is noise.

You don’t need ‘to get over yourself’. Especially without sedation, a ‘relaxed’ patient makes it far easier to do the procedure properly. The students needed to learn the most valuable lesson that the patient’s interests come first and that consent is critical.

And here we have the root problem of the piss poor NHS. People who simply refuse to engage with reality. Refusal to accept that the system is broken and urgently needs major reform.

Yes and I agree.

But it's also probably part of why the NHS isn't.

And they have their point too - which is that they pay even more taxes to fund a system which doesn't always deliver what they need, so they are damn well getting their warts done when they can.

I agree with you that the idea of free healthcare for all is wonderful, inspiring and heart-warming. I understand the desire to "hold onto that." But it has to work when it needs to - and not just for some and at random.

It needs investment.

I agree.

I have private healthcare through work and its been night and day compared to NHS, I'm sorry to say.

My husband and kids weren't included in my cover plan. DS was seriously ill 2 yrs ago (he was just 3yrs old) and NHS did absolutely nothing - A&E kept sending back to GP to do urgent referrals to peads... which was in the same bloody hospital as the A&E!? Why can't they do referrals between A&E and other hospital depts? Why are GPs such gatekeepers? Anyway, we paid out of pocket for Bupa urgently and he got the care and op he needed ASAP.
7 months later I got a text saying my son had an appointment with Peads at a local hospital, I was confused and rang them assuming it was a mistake...no,no, it was the URGENT referral the GP had sent for 8 months prior. It's an absolute shambles.

I have since paid for DH and DCs Bupa plans myself as I will never risk my family having to endure no treatment such as that again. I'm incredibly fortunate that I can afford it.

Not seen anyone saying they wanted a US system. There are lots of alternative systems between the NHS and the US system, such as Canada, Australia and throughout Europe, mostly being an insurance backed, but state system, often with partial co-payments etc. We really need to look at what works well across the Channel and learn from what works in most other developed countries rather than obsess about the US.

The thing is that unless the NHS is reformed massively, we're sleep-walking into the exact kind of health system we don't want, i.e. the US system of private insurance, which is already growing rapidly in the UK.

We really can't just carry on as it is, the NHS is already collapsing and no longer fit for purpose in lots of ways, and no, throwing more money at it won't solve it's problems without massive reform as to how it operates.

It 's very complicated - France is famed for it.

Gynaes - the French take preventative medicine very seriously. It's very normal see a gynae annually, for a general checkup / contraception / breast check / up to date with smear tests / etc. My polyps were picked up at a routine check up and explained the hugely heavy periods I'd been having and dismissed as perimenopause. Like I say I was operated on and biopsy results received within a few months.

Low income
It depends why they are on a very low income.

Pensioners tend not to be in France - its pension and social care / benefits system is famously generous (and currently bankrupting the country but hey ho).

Large families, with e.g. only one minimum wage earner, would qualify as low income and receive 100% / no upfront charge for medication / GP visits.

If you have a long term illness or handicap (cancer, physical handicap) then you qualify for ALD and again 100% cover, no upfront charge for medication / GP visits.

Benefits for handicapped people in France are much more generous than in the UK to begin with so they can afford to have a mutuelle etc and to pay upfront for costs. If they really cant, the public hospitals provide free care - just in less fancy surroundings and more of a wait.

France does a lot of means testing, based on income (as declared to the tax office) and size of family / number of children. Each family basically gets a coefficient, calculated each year - this is applied to everything from healthcare to school meals to funding for school trips. It allows lower-income families to receive more financial support compared to higher income, who don't need it. It ensures that there is a comprehensive, basic level of care for lower income, while giving higher income people the opportunity to pay a little for a higher level of service. So when I pay all my (high) taxes, and I choose to go to a private clinic rather than the local public hospital for treatment, it frees up those resources for my lower income neighbour. So everyone wins. And unlike in the UK I'm not forking out 15K£ for my private knee replacement, I'm paying a couple of hundred out of my pocket if I choose a fancier clinic, and that's all as the rest is reimbursed.

YANBU but so many people have bought into the story they've been sold that the NHS doesn't work anymore. For a long time the government has been subcontracting NHS services and processes to private businesses that charge an extortionate amount and do a rubbish job, while ignoring real change that needs to happen with things like administration and technology. Then they turn around and shrug and say 'well I guess it just doesn't work anymore, we'll have to privatise it 🤪' as if asking a FOR PROFIT company to provide health care is a great idea.

The problem is that I dont trust either labour or the tories to manage the NHS properly. They all go to Eton together, their families are all friends, they're all interested in lining each other's pockets.

What we really need is someone who has genuine faith in socialist structures like the NHS, like the Green party. People will argue and say well they've never been in power so they're untested, they don't have the experience. No they don't, it's a risk. But we've SEEN what Labour and tories too and I know for a fact I don't trust them with the NHS. Time for a radical change I think.