NHS accused of favouring men changing gender over women with medical needs for breast surgery

[NotSoLittle]

Telegraph article " NHS accused of favouring men changing gender over women with medical needs for breast surgery Report says NHS has 'facilitated greater access' to surgery for gender dysphoria patients whilst services are cut for women in pain"
archive.today/bRJd3

NHarding I am so sorry, I don't know what to say.

I’m so, so angry that my taxes are used to fund men’s desires to have their very own pair of fake breasts. And yet DN waited a year for urgent heart surgery.

Want fake breasts? Pay for it yourself, or better yet, pay a therapist.

@NHarding
Well yes, because it’s approximately as funny as a bucket of cold sick over the head the NHS don’t fund wheelchairs for people they say need them. It may just be the autism - I thought you were trying to make a wholly serious point about provisioning (albeit using a dramatic example) & simply happened to choose an area that is horrifically underfunded.

Both your CCG & NHS England have some very serious questions to answer if your surgeon has been required to do surgeries that NHS England does not fund - where exactly has that money been diverted from?! If you’ve not already done so, making a Freedom Of Information request to them about how many of said surgeries they’ve done over, say, the last 5 or 10 years; & the number of the exact type of surgery you need over the duration of whatever time period you chose to ask about; plus some other aesthetic surgeries required by women (again, same time frame) would be illuminating. Worth asking for details of pauses for Covid, too. Because those surgeries have been funded somehow; & basically it’s by defrauding the NHS in some way. Which is exactly the sort of thing to take to your MP, in that Questions Should Be Asked In The House.

Alas it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the benefit of wheelchairs is grossly underfunded as well, especially for people that they are recommended to. I suppose it would be a similar experience for these people if the resource was diverted to people who did not have a medical need for their use?

The problem with the labyrinth of NHS services is that the policies change all of the time across different regions. As such, there doesn’t appear to be a uniform approach. Evidently my surgeon performed these operations when they were either routinely covered or if a request for funding was approved by the commission. Either way, this doesn’t help women like me - whether patients are MtF or FtM, the scandal is that breast augmentation is being carried out on the shoulders of a psychological diagnosis rather than a clinical necessity.