NHS wait times

[IdleGossip]

Just back from gp who wants to refer me to gynae. As it’s a non-urgent issue, she said the wait would be “over a year”. How is this in any way acceptable?

Who would you tax ?

I wouldn’t tax anything. The whole system needs complete reform.

It's ridiculous OP.
My optician referred me to the NHS regarding my cataracts. After nearly a year waiting for the initial assessment appointment my vision had deteriorated so much I bit the bullet and decided to have them done privately. Just before the operation I received an appointment date with the NHS. When I phoned up to cancel it the woman I spoke to said I was doing the right thing because even if the NHS decided my cataracts were ripe enough to operate I would have had to wait possibly another year or more for the operation. I don't know how I could have managed during the wait time because even by the time i had my private cataract operation i was at the stage of not being able to read bus numbers and just everyday functioning was becoming impossible. I was getting double vision in certain situations.

I'm very lucky I had the money for the operation. A lot of people aren't. And I really feel for them.

My health board is one of the most cash strapped. I've recently had to go through the complaints procedure because they arbitrarily halved my long term prescription for a chronic health condition. They didn't even communicate with me that they were doing this. I found out via a third party when I went to collect the prescription. The stress was unbelievable. I got the decision over turned. The way it was done was almost a bullying tactic. Presenting a fait accompli. I challenged it but I'm sure some people wouldn't have.

Personally i feel very unsupported by the NHS system. And as someone who lives alone and is getting on in years it is a very worrying feeling

My grandson was diagnosed at birth as needing a procedure. Non-emergency. He is approaching his sixth birthday and is still waiting for an operation date.

Tayside. 65 weeks on the urgent list. Hysterectomy was in Jan this year.

Unfortunately there will never be enough money the remit of the NHS cradle to the grave is even more unobtainable due to the advances in modern medicine. Even in its infancy they wildly underestimated how much it would cost. I remember doing research as an undergraduate. Its original running cost was estimated at 134 million in 1948 but it cost over 400 million that first year.

As well as advances in medicine, radical social policy changes and societal changes mean it’s not sustainable now and it’s been creaking along for far longer than people realise.

The system does need complete reform but it would be very unpopular if it wasn’t all free cradle to the grave. There will be a time it isn’t completely free it’s just a matter of when.

I’m so sick of the NHS, and the attitude that’s it’s a great thing and needs protecting. It isn’t at all. It’s not great when you wait over a year for an urgent hysterectomy, it’s not great when you wait 4 years for therapy at CAMHS (if you’re fortunate enough for your referral not to be rejected), it’s not great to wait 5 hours for an ambulance, it’s not great if you go to an appointment and are left waiting for hours on end. It’s totally unacceptable.

The funding model needs to be binned. Service standards need to be set. We need to find out what works well overseas and copy that. It is totally unacceptable for the NHS to be allowed to blunder on while everyone just shrugs their shoulders.

It would be nice if they didn't wait till patients have stopped breathing before dispatching ambulances too.

My DS is 3 years and waiting for autism and adhd assessment
My DD is 9 months and waiting for a physio appointment
My DM needed operations for carpal tunnel - was told a year so went private as in pain
My DF needed an operation for cataracts and was loosing his sight and was told a year so also went private

Its a fucking shit show

And yet we are told time and time again by the Scottish government that we are doing so well.

Agree that there needs to be a total reform - without the shrieking about American style healthcare. I want a system like they have in Spain, Germany, Norway, Netherlands where employees are insured by their employers, old/disabled/young people insured by the state.

The Scottish NHS is doing worse than the English NHS in all areas other than A&E waits. The main issue is employing too many staff and paying them too much. Far more of our funding goes in staff costs here than in England and there no money left for service improvements. It’s a dire situation. There’s also a resistance to using any private healthcare capacity to help out. In England they drove down waiting lists post covid by using private healthcare, whereas here we refuse to do so and waiting lists get ever longer.

It’s a combination of terrible governance by the SNP and ideological resistance to measures that have positive results. What a surprise!

So will the grand plan to rationalise the health boards into east and west help? Where are those extra staff because they can;t be patient-facing.

Fife.

I recall having a long wait for a reasonably urgent gynae issue (post-menopausal bleeding).

Found a lump last year and GP told me I was on the 2 wk pathway. Heard nothing and phoned the department secretary to check on the waiting list. At least 18 wks, even I agreed to be seen in Forth Valley instead of Fife.

I needed a result in order to get insurance to fly out to attend a family wedding.

In the end, I paid about £400 to see a consultant at the Spire and about another hundred or so for the mammogram on the same day. Was able to book for the following week and got the all clear, I'm happy to say.

I don't think I could have afforded treatment if it had gone the other way, but I needed to know whether I could go ahead with booking my trip. I'm lucky I could afford to pay for the treatment.

About three years ago, I needed to get my legs checked out for a problem that runs in Mum's side of the family. I had to go private for that - around 300. I was seen by the chap who used to do the scans for Fife. Fife NHS no longer does them at all.

I wonder whether being combined with another authority will help matters? I believe that there's already a loose coalition with Dundee and Edinburgh for heart problems and some other issues.

The Scottish government are actively lying to you on a daily basis with regards to NHS wait times. For every speciality it’s an average 30-40 week wait for an appointment regardless if it’s urgent or routine. If you then agree to surgery (especially Gynae) it’s then another 2 year wait at least!

Gynae alone has about 100–150 referrals a week. The system cannot cope anymore

Oh @WearyAuldWumman you must have been beside yourself. I have been recalled twice after routine mammograms (fine both times) but the terror and feat when waiting is just awful.

They should publish the figures rather than it just being hearsay and discussion on forums like this. Monthly or quarterly as a minimum. The health secretary needs to be held to account and explain WHY it's OK to keep people waiting so long for required treatment. This is nothinhg to do with individual doctors and nurses who are doing their best, it is a systemic issue. Although I'd imagine the fact that higher rate tax payers like senior nurses and doctors are paying a lot more tax on their NHS salary isn't helping.

This isn't ever going to get better without someone being brave enough to do something radical.

It would be good to see waiting times per specialism in weeks every quarter so we could plot then on a graph and see if they are getting better or worse, but seeing how badly they are (rightly) getting roasted for the terrible PISA stats I can’t see that happening.

I know there are stats but they do not separate urgent referrals and routine referrals so that skews the numbers.

My grandad was referred 2 years ago for cataracts and he just got his first done 2 weeks ago and getting his second done in a couple weeks. He had to go to Glasgow for it we are NHS Lothian. My gran was told she needs them but she’s like I’m 84 have dementia I’m no taking a space up for someone younger who could benefit from them xxx

I hope your grandad's operations are successful @Cece92 .I was terrified before mine but they have been truly life changing.

I think your gran sounds a wonderful unselfish person.

It must waste so much money not catching problems, so they get much worse. And of course lots of people must be dying unnecessarily.
It doesn't help that there isn't much private provision in Scotland - even if you have the money, you can't easily go private. There aren't enough specialists and even to go private there are long waiting lists (not as long as the NHS, but still long).
I also don't get why Swinney boasts about how much more NHS staff are paid in Scotland than in England. Surely that's a sign of government incompetence, paying more than the going rate? They do the same about teachers - why is paying teachers much more than in England something to boast about? As a taxpayer, I'd like to see people paid the going rate, not massively higher rates for no good reason.

I agree that getting old in Scotland is an extremely scary prospect. You know that if you get something bad, you've had it. Things are so much better on the continent.

The average experienced nurse is paid £4k more in Scotland than England, and there are. Double the number of experienced nurses per head of population here. AND the nhs was one of the areas with people being paid whose roles had been made redundant. This is where our money is wasted. This sorts of thing.

My OH can barely walk due to pain in his feet. All our GPs do is give him stronger painkillers that make no difference.
He's been referred to the pain clinic, orthopaedics and podiatry but told the wait is about 7 months.
In the meantime he'll have to give up his job.

It's absolute shit.

Re PISA: the Curriculum for Excrement is disastrous. (I'm a retired secondary school teacher.)

To be fair, it was Scottish Labour that put it in place - but (probably because of the 'sunk cost' fallacy) the SNP government stuck with it.

I actually wrote to my MSP and shared my concerns as a PTC. She passed my letter to Mike Russell.

Mikey wrote to me to tell me that teachers had been consulted...Aye, we were. We told them it was keech and they ignored us.

Such a long wait in Scotland for gynecologist that I had to go private.