There is all sorts of issues, the latest one to anger me?
I have been trying to get a late day appointment for the past 2 weeks, my GP currently has 6 permanent doctors, yet according to the receptionists only 4 appointments after 4.30pm are available for the next 4 weeks.
The surgery is open till 6pm and these are 10 minute slots, so whats happened to the other 116 or so slots? These are not appointments booked up, they simply stated there is only 4 available to book and the slots are no longer available as policy, one receptionist was about to give me a reason but then stopped early sentence like she was not allowed to say.
Access to healthcare seems to be getting very hard in my area, I think its highly variable per region tho as different regions are at different stress points. A postcode lottery so to speak.
My last referral was done via a private GP, he told me the NHS GPs are under tremendous pressure to hold people back to save money.
It doesn't matter. You are getting caught up on the profit is bad, but it isn't. Profit creates capital to invest in new projects and if everyone can afford food it doesn't matter that the profit margins are massive. Its always been better than state run food programs.
You may know how the food industry works, but you clearly fail to grasp basic economics.
In fact if the NHS is so amazing and cheaper than private industry, why don't they make it so people can pay less tax, but not receive health care from the NHS. Then we would see how cheap it really was.
I dont quite agree.
A for profit organisation always needs extra money to generate the profit, in addition shareholders tend to want profit growth year on year so the demand for profit is always growing. Profit could be compared to "waste" in state entities.
So the question is if the waste in NHS is more than the combined waste in a private healthcare and the profit making, if it isnt then a state funded NHS is better value for money.
I havent a clue as to exact reasons for the NHS problems.
But some reasonable assumptions are.
1 - Per adult head, our NHS is underfunded vs other top EU countries such as france and germany.
2 - Some staff seem to have a lot of clout in terms of their terms of employment, favourable hours and pay, my local hospital has been paying doctors to cover a&e over £70 an hour. That is clearly a ridiculous situation been abused by doctors, pure greed. It got so bad, several times a&e was left unmanned as managers had massive restrictions on authorising the doctors to work due to out of control costs, including the last time I went a&e.
3 - bad management of resources, so often I see nurses standing around chatting to each other or look like they struggling to stay busy, as well as admin staff, but doctors the opposite, when I left a consultants room after an appointment there was a queue of 3 staff waiting at the door for him, at a time he was 90 mins behind on appointments. So some resources clearly need shifting from nurse and admin staff manning levels to doctors. This massive shortage ironically is probably why problem #2 exists as the doctors know they in so much demand.
Healthcare is been compromised, high quality drugs no longer get prescribed, people have to either make do with less effective alternatives which can drastically reduce quality of life or even cause death, or no alternative at all. Doctors make assumptions that are dangerous like mistaking cancer for a minor infection, probably because the latter is cheaper.
There is doctors at my hospital which can barely speak english.
If the system was privatised, I can see some of these problems been dealt with especially #2. But I also feel overall funding would drop so problem #1 would get worse. Of course my private GP appointments have generally been productive, but I am paying a big wad of cash for those appointments.
A general observation based on the treatment given to me, my frends, family and what I read in the news, is that the NHS always value preserving life over maintaining quality of life. So if e.g. a condition doesnt have an immediate risk of killing you but is crippling you, then that would be lower priority than keeping someone in the last minutes of their life alive. Which is why so often people get brushed away, but then when the problem becomes real serious the NHS suddenly acts like it gives a crap. Also the 999 service is generally quite good as thats dealing with people in very grave situations. Its always going to be controversial on what people think is a better use of resources, so much of the NHS money is used to prolong life of the elderly probably at the expense of the working age who need treatment. For sure ideally there would be no choice to make and no compromise anywhere, but there is compromises currently been made.
Also since the abolishment of PCT's I feel the NHS has no public accountability, the complaints procedure since that got removed is a joke.
In this thread I haven't even spoken about the mental state of my wife either, she is so low at the moment that it is affecting everything, she is not coping mentally at all. I wanted to keep the thread just on track for the hospitals inability at manage her direct problem.
Her GP is helping her manage the mental state she is in at the moment, but she isn't in the best of places - quite understandable too. She doesn't get more than 60 mins uninterrupted sleep ever, because the pain wakes her up constantly. She is napping on/off during the day due to lack of proper sleep, but short naps do not do what a proper 7-8 hours sleep does. This is also affecting her mental well being.
But this is just a byproduct of the underlying primary issue, that is her condition.
You have my sympathy 100%, I have personal experience of what can happen when an initial problem is left untreated, it then causes other problems like dominoes falling down, e.g. a lack of sleep can severely harm a human, she cannot sleep because of pain, which in turn has likely caused other issues and the prolonged period of pain and lack of treatment has affected her mentally. The NHS has increased its own costs of treating your wife by failing to treat her early at the onset of illness. It may be years for your wife to return to normality as the result of all this.
I can sympathise with that. I had gallstones when I was in my early 20s. Given that I was fit, had spot on cholesterol there was obviously no logical reason for me to have them they weren't diagnosed. For 12 months my gp tried me on various meds and painkillers which did nothing. It was only at this point i finally had an ultrasound scan which confirmed what the problem was. For 18 months I never slept through a single night due to the pain. I was genuinely losing my marbles. Nothing took away the pain. I was making myself sick, sitting on the toilet for hours, avoiding food, doing anything I could to try and just alleviate the pain even slightly.
In the end I crawled in to A and E on my hands and knees coughing up blood.
They initially refused to operate saying something needed to be scheduled through my GP and then a referral and that I had to go home. I refused to leave. They called security. The security guards refused to move me as they could clearly see how ill I was with one of them actually saying "he's in A and E, this is where he needs to be otherwise what's the point of the place?".
I passed out at some point after that. Woke up the next morning without a gallbladder as it had ruptured.
The surgeon that operated on me apologised on behalf the the NHS pointing out it should never have gotten to that stage.
excellent from the security staff, I hope they didnt get fired for what they did.
I will give you a great example. Food. Food industry is private nobody massively overcharges for food very few people go hungry and food is plentiful and cheap.
I wouldnt consider food cheap, there is a lot of people with malnutrition and we have food banks as evidence people are struggling to afford to buy food.
As an example 10 years ago I could buy 4 Cornish pasties for a £1, now they nearer a £1 each.
Sometimes the price inflation isnt crazy but instead the food amount is reduced so they reduce the weight of the food you buy in the packaging.
Food has most definitely got way more expensive despite competition in the market.
Gas and electric also has competition and has out of control cost increases, competition is by no means a guarantee prices will be restrained.
