AIBU to be frustrated by NHS delays and inefficiency?

[LovingLilacDuck]

I think the NHS is so incredibly inefficient sometimes, I mean the system not the care. From getting an appointment in a GP to referrals to actual appointments literally take months sometimes. WHY?

Why do we have to keep up with this? Surely a proper healthcare system that works as it should must be a priority? It’s 2026, goodness sake!

Some can afford private healthcare and some can’t. Yes, NHS is free for all but is it ACCESSIBLE, I’m not sure. Therefore I think this rubbish situation where you have to be on a waiting list ??? for months must, must be sorted.

AIBU to be so frustrated?

Not just the NHS. These are some examples of the private health care system in the UK. A private hospital, in which doctors moonlight in between working on the NHS - most of them do that, private doctors could not survive full-time doing private work, not enough idiots to pay for their services twice, so only very desperate or very wealthy book them. They have consultations twice, once or maybe three times a week, only morning or evenings, the rest of their work is NHS. They dictate letters which are given to the secretaries to type. Because a private hospital is not really a hospital, but a facility which leases consultation rooms, operating rooms, admin and secretaries and receptionists by the hour to the doctors and charges doctors for their use, the hospital is not incentivised to hire too many medical secretaries. Secretaries type like crazy and there is always a backlog of typed letters to send out, i.e. significant delay between a patient being seen by a doctor - a doctor dictating a letter - a letter being typed and then sent back to the private doctor to OK it - and a letter being sent out to the GP. Letters are sent out always by 2nd class mail, never by email. Frantic patients call this private hospital, asking for their results (usually in letters from private doctors) and secretaries, who also answer the phones, are told to tell them 'your letter will be sent to your GP'. Letters are never sent out to patients, only to the patients' GPs. Secretaries are not allowed to tell the patients the results over the phone, so delays are crazy. Another point is that self-referrals for private patients are only a relatively recent thing - the absurdity is that some private doctors demand a GP referral - like if a person is paying himself, why does he need a referral from the GP to see a specialist private doctor? This crazy system is not an NHS system, I am afraid. This is a UK-type craziness.

YABU.

One person, Psoriatic arthritis, very heavy bleeding aged 52.

Biologics c. £20,000, not including chest x rays, review appointments, blood tests and the delivery service

Appointment with an oral surgeon, excision and biopsy of a buccal lesion (assuming it is all OK and there isn't something awful going on in there) £2,000

Physiotherapy. £1,100.
Hydrotherapy. £1,200.
Acupuncture. £650.
Custom orthotics prescribed by a biomechanical specialist. £750.

Abdominal and transvaginal ultrasound and consultant review. £350.
Insertion of Mirena with local anesthetic 3 weeks later. £650.
Smear test. £250.

Mammogram. £2-350.

HRT. £1,150.

Hearing aids. £1,500+ for bluetooth ones, not rechargable, per ear, assuming hearing test is free and the cause of tinnitus has already been established via MRI the previous year to not be due to anything life threatening.

Fairly obviously to anybody working in insurance, these would all be pre-existing conditions, so wouldn't be covered.

And then there's the occasional illness, vaccination, flare up of psoriasis needing steroid prescription, a flare up meaning an ultrasound guided intra articular steroid injection is necessary in the ankle or elbow, slips, trips, road accidents or anything else.

To me, the cost of a couple of hygienist and dental appointments, eye test and glasses and a wait for non urgent things doesn't seem to be a poor rate when all of that is taken into account.

OH is in agony with foot pain and has finally got an NHS podiatry appointment. On the instructions it says "Go up the stairs.....". Who the actual F thought a podiatry clinic upstairs was a good idea?
The worst thing is that this is a new location- the old one was on the ground floor 😡

When I lived in Germany, 20 years ago, my healthcare cost me 521 euros a month, done via PAYE, for public health insurance.

I am quite sure I pay nothing like that towards the NHS as a proportion of my national insurance.

I wish that we all paid a health insurance levy directly for the NHS - then it would be more transparent. We could hold a referendum that asked if people felt like you and wanted to pay more to address it, or whether they preferred to pay the same and keep the status quo.

You are low for a mammogram. I paid £650 privately three years ago, and that was a subsidised corporate rate.

Otherwise I fully agree with everything. People who have never paid for and used healthcare abroad have no idea how amazing the NHS is.

I would be militant about not allowing foreigners who haven’t paid in to use it though - like every other country is.

The other thing that is really great about the NHS is that they are not incentivised to prescribe things that won’t work. The diagnostics are intended to ger straight to the root of the problem, not make money from insurance for the medical practice. It’s a really key difference.

@MinasamaI have used & paid for healthcare in France, my experiences have been better than here.

<head desk>

Although I completely understand if you have thousands of pounds worth of treatment for a number of different things than you will have a different perspective.

I had that. Had to jump through two heating tests exactly the same months apart just with a different tech to then wait months for a MRI to get the grand answer of. We don’t know.

@JenniferBooth<head desk> ?

I didn't want to go for the higher prices to make it sound worse/better - my biologics can cost far, far more than the estimate and I know the cost of a routine mammogram can differ from one in respect of a lump.

I would point out that NHS care is restricted to primary care and emergency treatment if somebody is a visitor, other than things that affect the population like communicable disease, though. Every appointment I've been to in different hospitals has made it clear in letters, posters and at the desk that treatment is not free outside those restricted requirements. I've certainly not got a problem with somebody becoming ill and being found to have TB being given treatment for free, for example.

It is totally broken, in my experience -and it goes way beyond the understaffing/running at too high capacity/pfi-cost debacles/waste/poor (lack of integrated) IT systems that are part of the problem. Whilst there are undoubtedly good people working within it, there are huge issues with the prevailing culture in many hospitals (lack of involvement of patients in decision-making, an inability to admit to mistakes, an unwillingness to admit to not knowing something and deferring to someone/somewhere else, a lack of critical thinking or forward planning, a preference for/bias towards kicking the can down the road whenever possible - I could go on). Unfortunately, I’ve had to make a lot of use of the NHS over the last three years (for family members, not myself) and, whilst I’m grateful for the existence of free-at-the point of access healthcare, the NHS in its current form isn’t working. How the people working in it cope with the the dysfunction and stay sane is beyond me.

It’s a shit show

I have used & paid for healthcare in France, my experiences have been better than here
How long ago? Because the healthcare in France is nowhere what it was 10 or 20 years ago.

Also, if you paid for it, you would likely got your care in a clinic rather than hospital. Like in India or the States, when you can afford the care, surprise surprise, you get quicker treatment!

I've found most gov services to be utterly useless.

I went self employed at the start of April and more than four months later HMRC still haven't managed to reactivate my UTR code. Yesterday they admitted they needed to start from scratch again. Have complained but they're fucking useless. The process should take a few weeks, not over four months. A colleague has been waiting since Jan.

As I'm working on the CIS scheme, not having an active tax code means I pay an additional 50% tax. It's really pissing me off! All this money week after week for four months which I won't see back for a year.

And I shan't talk about my tribunal where my ex boss had agreed with ACAS to settle the debt but realised after several instances of my tribunal date being changed that he would be able to get away with it. I won the case but it took two years, by which time there were no funds left in the business to pay me.

That's crazy if they're giving you tablets that increase your weight to the stage of needing weight loss surgery.

That's crazy if they're giving you tablets that increase your weight to the stage of needing weight loss surgery
Or maybe that's not exactly what it is! Some drugs can have a potential to increase weight, but only to the point that it means better managing one's diet. Very few drugs will make you put on weight however little you eat. High level of steroids would, but it doesn't sound that's what OP would have been given to treat the conditions she describes.

I was shocked this week to find out that opthalmology literally triages urgent referrals by date only. My 8yo dd has a confirmed vitamin A deficiency which needs treatment with a high dose only prescribed by a paediatrician/consultant. Her referral hasn't even been triaged yet as they are working through June still and the referral was sent on Monday. There are already visible changes to her eye and the potential for damage obviously increases the longer it's untreated 😭

@LovingLilacDuck , the NHS is not particularly efficient. Private healthcare is way more efficient but suggest moving to a system where there is more private evolvement and a huge proportion of the country lose their shit. The NHS. is our national sacred cow and the tin lies the issue.

Should have listened to corbyn

@Passaggressfeduprecent & years ago. GP & hospital & I have a parent who lives there. I still think the system is better, why do you think it isn’t?

Because a large part of my family live there, different towns, some 100s miles apart as well as France and I'm shocked to hear how badly it's gone down. Same follow up as I and I'm so much better cared for under the NHS for the same issue.

Difficult conversations needed about often futile and prolonged, expensive efforts to prolong poor quality aged life at all costs. NHS nurse of 37 years.

No. I’ve been waiting 20 months for an ‘urgent’ referral/appointment.

How do the staff carry on, and stay sane? Because despite everything we are trying to do our best for every patient, constrained by all of the above. However burn out rates are high, not helped by criticism of the high staff sick rates in the press. I’ve been working in the NHS for over 30 years and I can’t wait to retire ( on my pension which everyone thinks is wonderful but actually works out at 30% of my current take home pay)