As i have said on here before when NHS threads have come up.
The single biggest problem with it is not finance or lack of staff {although they dont help} the biggest problem with it is the great British public..
We have a whole generation now that thinks everything in the NHS is free, even politicians and others that should know better refer to it as the ''free'' health service.
That leads to everyone and there granny now thinking it is ok to call an ambulance when barry the budgie gets a cough, or they want a lift home from the pub on a saturday night because they are too drunk to walk.
You see it on some of them 999 programs that are all over the Tv lately.
Saw one with a guy been drinking all day and he fell down the stairs, his missus called an ambulance they arrived and said yea you could have internal injuries etc best get you to the hospital. he refused to go. now because they were there in his house and in there opinion may have injuries that need hospital treatment they couldnt just leave when he refused to go. they had to stay. they now had a duty of care to stay with him.
They were in his house trying to get him to come with them for more than 5 HOURS.!! even calling the police didnt help
If the OP wants to know where the ambulance is when it isnt getting his mother in law to hospital.. well its at that drunks house more than likely.
And you see it over and over again, the solution to it is not to just throw more money at it it needs an attitude change.
That's part of the problem but is there any evidence of how much of the problem it is? It gets a lot of media coverage, but that doesn't mean it's all or even most of the problem or even a significant proportion of the problem. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
There are other problems mentioned - inefficient management, inefficiency imposed by politically motivated target systems, inefficiency imposed by the common foolishness of punishing departments for being under budget within an arbitrarily declared time period, inefficiency imposed by purchasing rules, etc.
A couple of minor examples of the last one from the company I work for:
A plumber was needed for a small job at a site. A local plumber of known reliability who had been subcontracted to do work at that site previously was available right away. Not allowed. The only allowed method was to phone an intermediary company who would subcontract that plumber for the job and charge double what he would have charged. Same job. Same person doing the job. Double the price.
A vacuum cleaner was required. Standard item, sold all over the place. Including from a chain of shops, one of which was about 100 metres from the site that needed it. Not allowed. The only allowed method was to pay another company to buy it from that shop and sell it to us at a significantly higher price and with a delivery time of 2 days rather than about 2 minutes to walk over the road and buy it. Same item, bought from the same shop. Higher price, far more delay.
This sort of thing happens all the time at all sorts of scale.
Another thing that increases costs is cutting costs. That might sound silly, but it's not silly to anyone who understands a job. Which rules out far too many people who are at a decision-making level. Cutting costs is usually done inefficiently and/or excessively and results in decreased efficiency and lack of maintainance, which increases costs. It's analogous to replacing a car in good condition with a car that's close to scrap. It's cheaper, so you've "cut costs". At the cost of repeated repairs which soon add up to more than the cost you "saved" while leaving you with using an inferior car.
I think a large part of the problem is lack of objective information because the whole issue of the NHS is so politicised.
