Cat versus human a&e

[catmummy22]

My cat was a bit poorly last night so I took her to the out of hours cat hospital. I called them at 8 pm and within 1 hour, I had booked the appointment, had her checked over and was back home.
My friend’s mother also took a turn for the worse last night. They drive to a&e at the same time as I went with my cat, but had to wait to be seen until 4 am. Suspected heart issue so quite serious.

I paid 350 pounds for my cat to be seen. I have pet insurance. I really wish I could pay £350 to be seen if I needed a&e too. I rather pay that than wait a. Ight to be seen.

My AIBU is in the different health care offered to pets versus humans in this country. As a human you can’t even pay your way to be seen in an emergency. Brits seem to think as long as it’s free, it’s good, but is it time to start thinking about charging in the NHS too? I think so!

Imo, it would be utterly immoral for someone with a non-serious/non-urgent health problem to be treated before someone who is in urgent need of life-saving treatment simply because the first person has deeper pockets.

Assuming that there hadn't been something like a massive incident leading to multiple casualties, your 10-hour wait is more likely to be due to inadequate resources dedicated to A&E, and quite probably coupled with people having difficulty getting prompt treatment in primary care resorting to A&E.

I'm sure that, had you needed treatment urgently, you would have been triaged appropriately and been seen sooner. For something that can wait 10 hours, you may have done better to use your insurance for a private GP appointment.

I was recently taken to a and e with what turned out to be a very serious issue. I was left in there for 6 hours but the minute I was checked over everything went into overdrive and I was dealt with and admitted for 10 days.
What they and I didn't know because I had to wait for so long, was that I was about an hour away from full blown sepsis when I finally got the blood tests done.
If they had seen me sooner, would I have recovered sooner? I don't know.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the hospital itself and the treatment was very very good but a and e an absolute disaster. What to do about it? I don't know.

The problem with this is it means that all the doctors (who largely train at state expense in the nhs) choose to do paid work, and resource becomes allocated based on who can afford to may most as opposed to who is most in need of care. Do you realise that the £99 you're happy to pay quickly gets outbid by wealthy people with gold plated, extremely expensive insurance or deep pockets.

It is more effective is resource is prioritised to those who need it most, rather than those who can most afford it.

If you rush in to A&E with a grey baby struggling to breathe i guarantee you, you don't wait four hours to be seen.

And many of us get that same service from the NHS. I've never not got a same day appointment with the GP. My parents have been not got a same day appointment with the GP. Same for my children. Same for my husband (different GP practice to me).

you do, its called BUPA you pay your insurance and get seen privatly. what are you whittering on about?

There are 2 A&E departments in my NHS trust area.

One is in a commuter town 12 miles away on a mainly rural road, the other is 8 miles away in a city. It's usually quicker to get to the first one (60mph limit most of the way), and far less busy than the city one. And the first one invariably has much shorter waiting times.

Your cat had you to drive it to the vets
obtain it’s medication, drive it home again, administer the medication and care for it while it recovers.

And therein lies the problem at the heart of society which is significantly impacting the NHS. We have an aging population that requires care and a lack of resources to support the current ‘care in the community’ model. Hospitals are full of older patients who are medically well but not fully recovered and need support. They are ‘bed blockers’ but there is no where else for them to go.

Successive governments have ignored demographic realities; we need more convalescence places for people who no longer require hospital care but still need to rehabilitate and recover. We also need care places for people who through illness or injury can no longer cope alone. Additionally, we need care places for those with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Spend some time with family carers and see what they do and how profoundly important these people are - and how exhausted and unsupported they are. It will break your heart.

There is an army of volunteers that drive patients to hospital, pick up prescriptions etc for people who don’t have family close by to help. However, many of these volunteers started when they retired at sixty; where I volunteer (just one day a week because I’m in my fifties and still working) many are now late seventies and no longer able to carry on. Where is the next influx of volunteers going to come from? Many are still working in their sixties and beyond through financial necessity.

Society is broken and the NHS is bearing the weight of decades of poor government decisions.

We do pay. It’s paid centrally from tax with an organised efficiency that is supposed to make it cheaper. The NHS IS remarkably efficient, thanks to the many staff - primarily women - who work incredibly hard in poor conditions every day. The problem is that we are paying a fuck load of tax and it’s being sucked out by private interests. They have killed this country and various principles of equality, justice, democracy and law, it’s just like a chicken running around with its head cut off.

your 10-hour wait is more likely to be due to inadequate resources dedicated to A&E, and quite probably coupled with people having difficulty getting prompt treatment in primary care resorting to A&E.

Its not just difficult getting prompt treatment in primary care. In some areas there is a real issue with people from cultures who don't have a GP equivalent and are used to seeking all medical treatment through hospitals. They often have a view that gps are somehow a poorer form of medical practitioner and will choose not to attend there even when they can access appointments readily.

Hello Nigel, you know you're wrong. You're just being provocative. Thank goodness, in this country, people in A&E are seen in order of their need, not in order of their bank balance.
Cats and dogs are put to sleep every day of the week because their owners can't afford the vet bills - often even with insurance which becomes expensive and hard to get with older pets or pets with conditions - perhaps we should introduce that for people too?

Drs and nurses do not train ‘at state expense on the NHS’, nor any more. They pay. We all pay. Again and again, thanks to the greed of the well-off. That is part of the problem, it just is not worth it for working people any more and recruitment onto training courses has dropped off a cliff. Far more lucrative to be a cleaner or work in a supermarket if you have to work for a living. Or of course a train driver: they get better protections in terms of shift work and rest times too.

So because I can’t afford healthcare or £99, much less £350. I should potentially die in a hospital corridor because my life is deemed less worthy, and someone else in the queue can pay and gets seen sooner?
The NHS was started because it wasn’t right that people with less means didn’t have access to healthcare.
I don’t think that should change.

Maybe you could buy one of these for £28...

...and take your self to Vet when the need arises?

Don't forget NOT to speak directly to the Vet otherwise they may smell a rat.

Footballer is a much better career choice now than being a public slave in the NHS. I’ll remind you that many, many of the people in the NHS would not themselves have a spare £350 to pay to go to the front of the queue. You’d be a bit stuck for help once you’d killed all the people who might be in a position to help you wouldn’t you, money or no? And that is the crux of the broken greed-led economy. You need near-slaves to run it, and you can fuck off with that.

Some of us started to sound alarms about the broken economy in the 2000s.

I think when the volume of cats waiting to be seen is the same as the volume of people then there would be issued with your very flawed ideal. I mean, on a Friday or Saturday night I cannot imagine the local vet is inundated with pissed cats needing stitches after a drunken brawl. You simply cannot compare the two situations, they are poles apart.

But on a serious note, YABU!

I already have Bupa thanks. What am I wittering on about? If you read my posts, I am saying we all need to pay. In my home country I pay £50 to see a GP or a visit to A&E. That’s pretty affordable for the majority of the population and then there are exceptions for people with chronic conditions, children and people who really cannot afford £50. Free doesn’t work.

This is what healthcare was like before the NHS. (Harry Leslie Smith, speaking at the Labour Party conference.)

Brits seem to think as long as it’s free, it’s good, but is it time to start thinking about charging in the NHS too? I think so!

You must be ashamed of this view OP, given you name changed before starting this thread.

Why so ashamed?

I think so took my cat comparison a bit too literally

Consider myself fairly left wing actually.

I don’t think this has anything to do with paying vs not paying. How many pets are rushed to A&E vs humans? Come on 😂 not only actual emergencies but also how many owners would just ride it out because they don’t have £350 to spare!

I agree with all small.co-payment tp be seen.

But for me the problem is- once payments are introduced- it won't take long for the cost to escalate.

Whenever something. Same happened with uni fees.

Start off small then the costs snowball.

So it might start off as £20-£50.

But a few years later it will costs thousands as further cuts and savings are made.

If we could follow somw of the Europeans or Australian model i think that would be good. But likely if payments were introduced it would be the USA model that is followed.

So why are you repeating right-wing tropes about the kinds of people in A&E?

Also, for me the severance of social care from medical care has been a disaster. (don't know if those are the right terms - I'm still not very well and not thinking clearly!) You get people bed blocking because there's nowhere safe for them to be discharged to.

And do not get me started on the appalling effects of the private sector taking over residential/care homes. There have been truly awful reports of neglect and abuse in homes where the private equity owners have utterly fleeced the taxpayers for negligent care. (Yes, of course it's possible to have that in state-run facilities. But at least each patient isn't seen as a cost to be minimised so that profits can be maximised.)

We pay.