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?

Can I ask how much you pay in countries like Germany, Is it taken out of your wages in tax? What about people who don’t work? How do they pay? Does everyone receive treatment regardless of whether they pay into the system or not?
I do think that there needs to be more done here regards cost versus benefit. I also believe lots of thinks should not be free at all.

I never said it was perfect, no health system is & personal experience cannot be used to judge if the NHS was better or worse.

Whatever the issues with the NHS back then, the fact is that "24hrs in AE" was a TV program, its now reality for over 76,000 patients.

Had a stroke? been in a vehicle accident? an Ambulance would attend within minutes, now it can be hours.

In 2010, "Corridor Care" was extremely unusual, again, its now the norm.

2.5m people in total, where on elective surgical waiting lists, now its 7.5m ( it was 5m in 2019, so cannot even blame Covid)

Yes, waiting lists get manipulated, they always have been but i have never seen 27 ambulances outside AE waiting to discharge patients as i did whilst waiting for my FiL to have a scan last week.

We've seen the NHS decimated & made far worse by demand.

On a personal level I have found private to be great for easy diagnoses and minor treatments, less so when there might be a serious problem.

The specialist NHS hospitals still deliver an excellent service and also do important research.The minor hospitals, however, are really struggling.

There are vanishingly few private ICUs and HDUs in the U.K., nearly all in central London, and I think only one private PICU (the Portland).

On the other hand, the waits on the NHS are unacceptable in a supposedly developed country, as is the attitude of some practitioners towards patients. (And I mean the waits for GPs, referrals and even lab test results).

Private insurance is notoriously unreliable, especially if conditions become ‘chronic’ or seriously expensive. A poster upthread talked of how good corporate private insurance is. The problem is that this ends when you retire or lose your job. Individual private insurance is another game, and one I prefer not to play! I just pay when I need private treatment and reckon I win in the end (of course, it is risky and you need decent savings).

In conclusion I do think the European model (as practised in France, say) works far better than our mishmash of NHS and private for those who can afford it.

Yes, my delayed cancer diagnosis and negligence claim was in 2006, at the height of Labour’s “let’s spaff money at the NHS without productivity increases!” I was in a mixed surgical ward, 12 beds, 1 shower, 2 toilets (and most patients were having bowel surgery). Burger buns with margarine for breakfast. I spent every day listening to building work because the Trust decided that its biggest spending priority, in those circumstances, was to build a fuck off great entrance to “Trust HQ” including a fountain made of local stone for them to swoop up and down in their BMW’s. And just to make sure they pissed employees and patients off equally, they built it over half of the staff car park. Genius management.

When my claim against the Trust settled about 2 weeks before the hearing (GP claim took longer), I was told that it was immoral to accept so much in damages from the NHS, since it lived hand to mouth and could barely afford the essentials. I’m afraid I laughed pretty hard, and took every penny (and donated a chunk to a cancer charity that picked up the pieces). If people only knew what the supposedly benign, caring, fluffy NHS was actually capable of - the idea of relying on it was scary even then.

Yes austerity, but one of the reasons there isn't enough money to spend now is how much of it is being spent on lousy PFI deals set up by Labour to build monuments to how great New Labour were. (Blair being the best Conservative PM the country had since Thatcher!)

A major new hospital nearby was built using PFI. When we first visited we were astounded. Extensive landscaped gardens costing who knows how much to maintain. An enormous three story height entrance lobby with a tiny reception desk marooned in an expanse of marble flooring needing cleaning. Light fittings and glass roof needing maintenance forty of fifty feet off the floor. The place eats money just to have it open, never mind supply a medical service.

Contrast with 3 local private hospitals, two with very high dependency units for post operative care including open heart surgery, is like comparing Buckingham Palace with Andy Windsors new home.

There's nothing inherently wrong with PFI but those contacts were walked into blindly by inexperienced negotiators unaware of how the private suppliers would milk every little change request for all time, which anyone who had worked for a big consultancy would have been aware of. It also released enough money to build beautiful but poor value for money and expensive to maintain public buildings.

It was infinitely better if measured by statistical evidence rather than anecdote. Even relying on anecdotal evidence public satisfaction with the NHS was over 70% in 2010, it now hovers around 25%.

https://assets.kingsfund.org.uk/f/256914/x/0ab966500b/rise_decline_nhs_england_2000-20_2023.pdf

We spend a lot of very high cost treatments. We can’t do that and treat all the common illnesses with what we currently pay. We need to pay more plus get rid of the top heavy managers (who are paid far more than nurses , middle grade drs and AHPs).

@Newbutoldfather

In conclusion I do think the European model (as practised in France, say) works far better than our mishmash of NHS and private for those who can afford it.

I agree, but sadly because of the "religion" status of our NHS, we WILL end up with the US version of "private" healthcare, i.e. expensive and exclusions etc. That's because so many people can't even imagine life without our free NHS - usually the people who havn't had to suffer it and don't want to pay for any health treatment. So we're sleep walking into the US system whilst standing by and watching the NHS collapse because there's no political will to change it.

We'd be far better having a more honest approach by our politicians to spell it out to the public that the NHS WILL collapse (and it will), unless we adopt a mainline European style of a state insurance backed system. Rather than lots of reviews and enquiries into the NHS, we should be having a very close examination of systems in Germany, France and Spain, to see exactly how they work, costs, etc., and then the UK politicians can present the "best of the rest" system to the electorate as a replacement for the NHS.

This is dangerously and frightening. That is what the shitty NHS workforce strategy was about, then.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/25/safety-fears-as-uk-hospitals-use-nurses-to-cover-for-doctors-due-to-shortage-of-medics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I hope people read the end of this article.

A RCN spokesperson said: “Advanced nursing practice is highly skilled, delivered by expert registered nurses and is underpinned by a masters level education and a comprehensive range of knowledge, skills and capabilities.
“These nurses are central to the delivery of safe and effective care across many services. They are not substitutes for other professions. They are autonomous professionals, delivering complex care as part of multi-disciplinary teams.”
A union source added: “This dangerous game is the BMA at its most obnoxious. Pushing nursing down will not help doctors and they need to avoid this getting more ugly.”

This is part of a long running campaign by the BMA to discredit the use of anyone but a doctor, in order to safeguard the employment of its members.

Every time they quote problems caused by Physician Associates and Advanced Practitioners without ever referencing them by how many of the same issues are caused by doctors. The example they mention, not reading the patients notes and missing a pulmonary embolism are certainly not unique to APs.

No fair judgement can be made about mistakes made by these people without comparing it with the rate of mistakes made by doctors. That information is completely lacking. The issue of under qualified people covering rota gaps against the rules needs addressing.

I have close experience of two interactions with these people recently. One was very skilled in the limited role she was employed for as a Physician Associate, lumbar puncture. The other was an epilepsy specialist Advanced Practitioner nurse whose telephone consultation was far more helpful than any of the many doctors and consultants we had seen to that point and resulted in a change to a far more effective drug.

“AHPs are trained to work in the same roles as docs”

Trained - except for those pesky bits like anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, epidemiology, pathology, biochemistry

And not ‘working within your competency limits’ and ethics.

So many doctors unable to get jobs, yet this. It’s a deliberate strategy, other than for its creators themselves, who will no doubt be hot footing it straight to the private sector to meet their own medical needs.

It is sooo subjective,so glad you had a good experience but it's like rolling a dice, I've had very bad experiences myself and so have family members. The most recent being a relatively young person (mid forties) going back and forth with worrying symptoms,being dismissed multiple times ending up in a and e and then being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and dying leaving a wife and two young children,my mum being ignored and misdiagnosed for years with her auto immune disease,and my autism being passed off as neuroticism basically,it's good when you fit certain criteria and the box they want you to fit in to is convenient,if it isn't you're fucked.

That is amazing for your MIL, but I can say I’ve had almost the opposite. I’ve begged for a hysterectomy, which 3 nearly 4 years later I still can’t get access to. I need something because bleeding for 6-9 weeks straight, having a 2 day break and bleeding again is not normal. I’ve been given a plan, but it’s only 6 months worth. I’m on month 4 and have no idea what to do when the medication is withdrawn…meantime I’m waiting on thyroid function tests, blood sugar level tests, liver and kidney function tests, another endometrial resection, GI tests, RA tests. Only one of these tests has been done - as my GP has diagnosed me with an auto immune disorder and ME.
So yes, the NHS is amazing, when it works, but when you are stuck at the back of waiting lists, desperately trying to stay alive, when every cell in your body is screaming to give up, no, it’s not great. There has to be a solution.
The Germans have a compulsory opt in system, where you have to have health insurance by law and there are websites like car insurance websites that tell you what tariffs mean what treatment you can get. There’s a lot of discourse around the American way (which is wrong imo) but the Germans have it set up like a full thing - you buy a car, you get insurance, you turn 18 - you get health insurance (or whatever it is) makes sense to me and it means that people won’t be waiting months or years to be seen by a doctor about actual life debilitating issues and be able to live properly.

Of course it's a deliberate strategy.

It's been caused by at least partly by the doctors themselves, or their increasingly militant union.

Let's take the example of the PA doing lumbar puncture.

I'd bet my bottom dollar that the reason APs are doing lumbar punctures is because at some point in time someone looked at a doctor doing that procedure and said "can't a nurse do that? ". And that the reply was "no it's a doctors job". And that happened so much, in so many places with so many things, that they dreamed up "Physician Associates" to get around the BMA restrictive practices.

I'd also be interested to know what doctors shifts these people are being asked to cover, since the question was asked at a time when doctors were striking and there may have been little choice. Of course if it's routine and they are under qualified then that should be addressed.

On what planet do you think that nursing eduction doesn’t cover anatomy? Or physiology?

I disagree completely. Doctors should not be replaced by nurses of any description on NHS wards. They don’t have the complexity of experience-if they did, they’d have a medical degree. Patients in hospitals are usually really sick. The government has promised that advanced practitioners are not being used in this way. People can defend it, but they won’t once their own relatives are affected. It’s patently ridiculous, and it’s headline news for a good reason.

And yet it was a nurse who overruled a consultant (behind his back, risking his own job) who got my husband sorted.

Well maybe she’ll do his operation next time.

After watching my dad being held hostage on an NHS cancer ward, left malnourished, dehydrated, with bed sores and injuries after several falls, whilst arguing with managers who wouldn't even refer him to the hospice that you could fucking see across the fields from his bed, begging for someone, anyone, from palliative care to come and see him and being fobbed off that we was "nowhere near ill enough for palliative care" (he died a week later), the NHS can get to fuck. I've told DH that if ever I need to be admitted to hospital, he's to firmly press a pillow over my face. Not even joking.

Have you ever tried to cancel an appointment? I did recently. The telephone number on the appt letter didn't work. Tried on the app, the hospital in question doesn't participate in the online appt system. Rang the switchboard, number 92 in the queue. Googled the email for the department, my email bounced back, 3 times.
Eventually I emailed PALS.
All this because they had booked it for the same day I had an appointment at a different hospital in the same trust.
I went for pre- procedure blood tests a week in advance as instructed. Got a call 4 days later, please go back for more bloods because the phlebotomist used the wrong tube. Didn't know until the day of the procedure whether results available. Asking around friends and family they all have similar experiences.

Yup, nail on the head re the administrative fiascos endemic within the NHS. My DH has had 8 years of continuous cancer treatments and it's just a constant battle to get appointments (even though he's on a fixed 4 weekly cycle of blood tests, treatments, prescriptions, consultant appointment) the NHS admins screw it up nearly every month and then they can't be contacted to get the appointments corrected. Many times he's had to go to the oncology ward reception desk to knock heads together to get them to understand the appointments are in the wrong order, or wrong weeks, etc as he's not been able to contact anyone by phone, due, like you say, to wrong numbers on letterheads, or answering machines where they never listen to messages, etc. I loathe the NHS "patient blaming" making out it's the patients who are at fault for wasted appointments etc - no mention of the NHS's own internal incompetence! He's complained about it to the consultant who just shrugs, he's made a number of complaints to PALS, but they just pass a message to the oncology department. It's not just appointment cock ups either - several times his prescription for controlled drugs has been late (but he HAS to start them on the specific day of the month) sometimes by a week or two, which screws up all subsequent appointments, a few times they've issued the wrong dose and once they issued the wrong drug! It's a good job he's on top of it all himself and checks everything they do. He even makes them double check the dose and time lapse of his regular monthly infusions which they've also cocked up several times. It's institutional incompetence.

Edit as I've just remembered another instance. They actually moved the entire oncology department from one hospital to another and didn't bother telling him despite literally visiting the ward for consultations, treatments and blood tests nearly every week! He suddenly found none of the phone numbers worked (all solid tone) - previously he could usually try several numbers and someone would answer - not even the "emergency" cancer nurses number worked. He went to the hospital to talk to reception and found the entire department locked and in darkness. No signs on the door etc explaining. So he went to the hospital main office and they kind of laughed nervously and said lots of people had turned up wondering what was going on and then told him where they'd moved to. All his appointment letters had said hospital X but the appointments had been moved to hospital Y, but they'd not re-issued the letters! When he finally phoned the new hospital and got the appointments changed (as a hospital 30 miles away meant some timings weren't possible), they said they'd already marked him down as an "did not attend" for one appointment there that he didn't even know about! He insisted they amend his records - they made a big song and dance that it "didn't matter" but he cited the Data Protection laws and rights to have incorrect records corrected and they finally relented!

I do wonder just how few of the official "missed appointments" were really the fault of the patient.

Yes, I appreciate some are complex to cancel. We have a direct team email checked hourly, and a direct phone number which is answered promptly.

I have a friend who is a transplant patient. He gets an annual telephone appointment from one department to review his medication. He sits next to the landline, mobile phone next to him, all day waiting for this call.
This year, the phone rang once. One ring. He answered immediately. The call disconnected. This was documented as a missed appointment and he received a letter remonstrating with him for not being available to take the call.

If only the NHS would roll out the system used by our local teaching hospital. It uses an app called MyChart that records everything in real time - test results, medications, appointments, procedures - the lot and makes all that information available to the patient.

Systemonline which our local GP service uses, logs all test results very quickly but has to be received from the hospital first.

Though if the result is "bad" or needs complex interpretation, a F2F appointment will be needed, the GP decides whether to upload to the patients online portal or contact the patient directly.

MyChart is a US tech giants product and apparently, it has, according to the BMJ and patient groups, caused more issues than it has solved, due to some results causing panic to the patient...