What is it people want with the NHS?

[stripyleopardsleep]

Had a lunch gathering this weekend and as often is the case, covid comes up and the vitriol towards the NHS was quite a shock to me.

• NHS is awful, not fit for purpose
• NHS staff are lazy, time wasters
• NHS staff waste appointments and don't know what they're doing
• NHS staff waste money, they shouldn't get any more
• no one wants any more money going into the NHS

The discussion went on....

I'm a hospital worker who has worked through the pandemic and I was quite bruised to hear what they thought about my work life and colleagues who I believe work incredibly hard in a huge unwieldy organisation.

But no one could say what they wanted? What would make it better? What does everyone want from the NHS and how can it be achieved?

I find those comments extremely harsh.
What I want from the NHS is for it to be funded properly. Even with waiting lists, it was great about ten years ago.
I am grateful for your hard work and that of your colleagues.

We are so lucky having the NHS. People should listen to how people in other countries go about getting healthcare where they have to pay for it. I will be forever grateful to the NHS when my husband had a heart attack last year and saving him.

Awful comments. It's a huge organisation so of course there'll be light and shade. But I've been very grateful for the NHS this year. It's worked brilliantly for me (but I quite like GPs doing remote triage etc).
I think the critics need to think more deeply than just mud slinging. We do need to come up with future solutions and some
Of those may be difficult philosophically. But think we must.

Wow, not surprising that you felt bruised listening to that. It truly amazes me.
What also amazes me is the number of people who still DNA appointments, even for specialised investigations. That’s a huge factor but no one seems to care about that. If people were charged for missed appointments, they wouldn’t be too keen.

@crazycrochetlady

Awful comments. It's a huge organisation so of course there'll be light and shade. But I've been very grateful for the NHS this year. It's worked brilliantly for me (but I quite like GPs doing remote triage etc). I think the critics need to think more deeply than just mud slinging. We do need to come up with future solutions and some Of those may be difficult philosophically. But think we must.

Absolutely. Everyone I know at work knows big changes are needed but how you engineer those in such a large organisation is mind boggling.

I'm wish I'd had the courage to ask them what they wanted instead if it was all so bad but I was feeling too stung!

Charging for missed apts seems a sensible first measure. You could have to give your credit card details pre apt to 'secure' it, and it only gets charged if you miss it. This would get round the inevitable faff and cost of chasing people

My DF had an appointment at our hospital one evening, it was to help catch up from Covid.
Three patients turned up, the others DNA’d. They didn’t even bother to cancel their appointment.

I want the NHS funded properly and I'm happy to pay more taxes to achieve this.

@stripyleopardsleep

Had a lunch gathering this weekend and as often is the case, covid comes up and the vitriol towards the NHS was quite a shock to me.

• NHS is awful, not fit for purpose
• NHS staff are lazy, time wasters
• NHS staff waste appointments and don't know what they're doing
• NHS staff waste money, they shouldn't get any more
• no one wants any more money going into the NHS

The discussion went on....

I'm a hospital worker who has worked through the pandemic and I was quite bruised to hear what they thought about my work life and colleagues who I believe work incredibly hard in a huge unwieldy organisation.

But no one could say what they wanted? What would make it better? What does everyone want from the NHS and how can it be achieved?

Wow! These are not opinions I'm hearing op. What a bunch of arseholes.

No one I know thinks that way. Time to rethink your friendships x

We are very fortunate to have our NHS and the wonderful staff who work so hard. It absolutely needs more funding and there are definitely some issues but in general it's a wonderful thing.

@PinkiOcelot

Wow, not surprising that you felt bruised listening to that. It truly amazes me. What also amazes me is the number of people who still DNA appointments, even for specialised investigations. That’s a huge factor but no one seems to care about that. If people were charged for missed appointments, they wouldn’t be too keen.

DNAs have been an issue forever. In my local children's hospital outpatient department, they had a big whiteboard that listed all the appointments given, and all the DNA figures. The amount of parents that had opted to waste appointments was staggering.

I think a small charge when booking an appointment, that is reimbursed if you show up, is wise.

Even now, with people waiting months and months for operations that they would usually have with weeks, you have piss takers. I know a chap who had been offered an op he needs for a day next week. He has turned it down as he doesn't want to be recuperating over xmas.

Disagree completely with those comments. The NHS needs better funding and increased capacity imo

I want a health service that is not perceived as free and which is depoliticised. That doesn’t mean that I want a US system, although from a selfish point of view I would be far better off with that system as I have a level of job that would come with top healthcare if I was in the US. My family and I have had shocking treatment on many occasions under the NHS. It goes back decades, under the Blair/Brown government and the Thatcher/Major government before it. Not just the current Tory government. In fact, when I had my first child under a combination of the Brown government and then the Cameron government at the very end, the care was shocking and midwives were already leaving in their droves back then.

OP I'm sorry you had to hear that and I am grateful to you for working so hard at personal risk.

But the NHS isn't fit for purpose. No system which has people waiting for hours in A&E, or months for operations, or even years for MH help or autism dx is fit. It just isn't. Even many of the aspirations we hear about show you how broken things are, like targets of 4h in A&E or 2w for cancer referrals.

The reasons behind this are complex but obviously involve chronic underfunding, poor organisation, and culture within the NHS. The funding is a massive problem but it isn't just that. The "hello my name is" campaign a few years back made me grit my teeth, because what does it tell you about an organisation's culture when it needs to run a campaign to remind its staff to introduce themselves?

It's really broken and for those citing other countries, I've lived in France, Switzerland, and the US. Yes they spend a lot more on health and their models (partic US) have many problems.

But I've never had to wait months for an op in any of those places.

I worked for the NHS for years and know how hardworking and committed all of my colleagues were.

And my GP surgery is fabulous.

Unfortunately as a service user of hospitals for a variety of reasons my experiences have been uniformly awful.

18 month wait for appointments
Impossible to see a consultant - only ever seeing junior doctors who need to refer to a senior doctor, so appts are a pointless waste of time.
Receptionists rude and surly (while I was in the late stages of labour ffs)
Midwives disinterested and lacking compassion
Hospital notes lost at EVERY appointment I've been to.

I'm embarrassed at how bad it is generally and find it hard to defend the NHS to people who complain about it, despite knowing how hard it is to be an employee of it.

The NHS is an absolute shitshow and the problem is the management of it.

This article is revelatory: www.spectator.co.uk/article/hospital-pass-the-nhs-is-on-life-support?fbclid=IwAR2Pqnmc1nRLaNpO12bM0-TLKdPxO5JRMeS-rCYqqZKEYe8zRrdLIXpALrQ

I know a lot of people complain about the NHS wait times and being understaffed, etc but I've never heard anyone speak that way about the staff or call them lady. Everyone I know thinks anyone who works for the NHS is a saint these days! I too have met the most wonderful kind people who work really hard for the NHS. Your friends sound like dickheads.

Lazy, I mean

@Panacotta I suspect it's heightened because of all the lockdown uncertainty to 'save the NHS' narrative which is making people feel frustrated and vulnerable so I do understand the anger and frustration on a certain level.

What I want from the NHS is prompt and decent quality primary care. That sadly is not available at the moment, and it’s been patchy for some time (for me, anyway).

What I want for the NHS is the end of the deification of it. It is not helpful. We are not here to help/save/support/cheer for it. It’s not some elderly relative that needs shopping brought round or a bit of a nudge to go to a bowls club. It should serve the population adequately.

@crazycrochetlady

Charging for missed apts seems a sensible first measure. You could have to give your credit card details pre apt to 'secure' it, and it only gets charged if you miss it. This would get round the inevitable faff and cost of chasing people

When people suggest this they then normally, when pressed, say they'd exempt pensioners and children, so the vast majority of the actual users of the NHS.

I think the NHS is broken and the model no longer works for numerous reasons.

I absolutely do not blame the staff for this. Most of them are doing their best in a creaking system.

There are, as in any workplace, a few dud staff members who don’t seem to care, and perhaps we notice them more because we are relying on them when we are ill and vulnerable. On the other hand we are extra grateful for the (many) good ones, for the same reason.

The NHS keeps people alive a lot longer than they used to, so much of NHS resources are used up by very few. With treatments getting more expensive and people expecting more from the health service I can't really see how it can win without it being about return on investment like any normal business. I am a massive supporter of the NHS however convincing many people to pay tax so one person can have a treatment costing 100's of thousands isn't really going to fly. The NHS recently approved a drug with a list price of £1.8 million because amazingly it would be cheaper in the long run. That is an awful lot of people paying tax to fund one treatment.

I think the system was created for a much younger population with a much shorter life expectancy and where far fewer people lived with multiple very complicated health conditions for many years and when medicine was less advanced in what it could do and aimed to do. I think it clearly desperately needs more money but ultimately the system needs redesign from scratch if it's ever going to meet current needs. How you actually do that in an age of increasingly political polarisation is very unclear to me, though - you'd need a huge cross-party group working in good faith and I don't think that's possible under our current government or anything like it.