Captain Haddock
- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
1. NHS letter arrives today to book consultant on line.
2. Choice of five hospitals - letter says all see 9 out of 10 patients within
21 weeks.
3. Click on each. No appointment available 'at this time'.
4. Keep clapping?
I won't bother telling you about the wait for wait for tests at QEQM (1 year! Corvid blamed naturally!)), delay in getting test results to doctor (I ended up tracking them down to a computer in Canterbury after a week (from where they were sent immediately by e-mail once I contacted them) or delay in transcribing Doctor's letter for consultant (try 'phoning up medical secretaries and recorded message asks you to 'phone after 14.00 - then I find they are only working mornings - so you can only contact them when they are not there!)
Bloody briliant.
1.4 MILLION Employees.
Spends £1 BILLION every 60 hours
Envy of the world?
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
victor matcham- Registered: 5 Oct 2021
- Posts: 1,034
They are the best in the world no other country in the world run one like we do.
Keith Sansum1
- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,856
I think there needs to be a wake up call.
The NHS. Is slowly being sold off
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Sue Nicholas- Location: river
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 6,018
My Son in law months to see a consultant.My Daughter best part of a year .Phone calls not face to face .On a public forum I shall not say too much but some people wait months for operations.If you are in the system.its ok .
The actual staff excellent it’s paper work .
Jan Higgins
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 5 Jul 2010
- Posts: 13,797
Sue Nicholas wrote:.
The actual staff excellent it’s paper work .
I will only add it is the medical staff in all the various departments that are excellent and doing their very best in the present situation, it is the top management side that leave a lot to be desired.
The fact that Covid seems to be deemed more important (unless at a really acute level) than cancer, heart disease and other life threatening or changing problems is what is now wrong.
victor matcham likes this
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I try to be neutral and polite but it is hard and getting even more difficult at times.
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Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
victor matcham wrote:They are the best in the world no other country in the world run one like we do.
What absolute rubbish. The Commonwealth Fund (which is nothing to do with 'our' commonwealth) does the best international comparisons between developed countries - see here:-
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/series/international-health-policy-surveys
Whilst the USA usually comes out bottomish we are no better than average overall (accessibility, waiting times etc) and rather worryingly close to bottom on 'healthcare outcomes' i.e. actually making people better.
It's no wonder that, to quote Vic 'no other country in the world run one like we do'.
Jan Higgins and Dover Pilot like this
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
victor matcham- Registered: 5 Oct 2021
- Posts: 1,034
I do not agree sir in most countrys you have to pay for treatment yes when I was working like the most of you we paid NH STAMP but I have been retired now some ten years I have got more out then Ipaid in going by todays prices and costs and there 67million living in the UK all getting free health care .
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
Vic, there is no such thing as 'free health care', the only question is how it is paid for.
The very fact that we are living longer and you for example (and possibly me) ' have got more out then I paid in ' suggests that the present model is unsustainable, a bit like my index linked pension from public service which none of my children will enjoy.
The Royal Commission on the National Health Service was set up by the Wilson government in 1975. It was to consider the "best use and management of the financial and manpower resources of the NHS".
That's nearly half a century ago and many of the treatments and the technology available today would be unrecognisable to those on the Commission.
Time for another Royal Commission methinks. The present system won't work any better just by chucking money at it and if we're not careful we will be spending so much on inefficiently treating 'illness' that we will have little left to spend and enjoy while we are still healthy.
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
victor matcham- Registered: 5 Oct 2021
- Posts: 1,034
We would all love to be healthy sir,no one of who are not like that would like nothing else but to be fit but life is not like that is it? When I was working I was looking forward to days when I retired of going away with my wife and days out,but it did not work out that way, there are millions in the same boat, and because of that we are so lucky to have the N.H.S. there.Yes you are right by saying nothing is free. In answer to that is I like millions of other folk worked hard doing long hrs working all our working life and beyond the retiring age ,but I had to pack it in at the age of 67 because of the kind of work I done,and also sir it was that kind of work that made me unfit to carrie on.
Matey likes this
Matey
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 11 Oct 2021
- Posts: 168
Wife banged elbow and trapped a nerve. Lost feeling in a couple of fingers. GP referred her to a specialist. Saw him within two weeks. Told her serious and needed surgery soon or risk loss of use of hand. Within four weeks she was done (Monday this week). Pretty good service I say.
Life without a dog is like a salad without lettuce.
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
Can't fault it for emergency treatment.
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
Matey- Location: Dover
- Registered: 11 Oct 2021
- Posts: 168
I forgot to add, it was NHS, so agree with Vic, we’re lucky to have it.
Life without a dog is like a salad without lettuce.
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
Hospital pass: The NHS is on life support
The cabinet meeting this week turned into a surprisingly frank conversation about the National Health Service. Rishi Sunak was asked to give his thoughts on the future of health and social care. He gave a candid assessment of the dangers of being blind to the NHS’s many shortcomings. It’s political blasphemy to criticise the NHS. But once Sunak started, others joined in. Jacob Rees-Mogg added his concerns. Steve Barclay, the new Cabinet Office minister, and Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, also contributed.
By the end of the meeting, the ministers had heard each other say out loud what they have long been thinking: that the NHS, as it stands, is failing. The government will soon be pouring almost half of day-to-day public service spending into a system which is falling short of what patients (and tax-payers) deserve. The money is there: since extra spending on the NHS became a Brexit mission statement, Boris Johnson has seen to that. The UK now spends almost 13 per cent of its economic output on healthcare — the highest in Europe. But the results are not coming through, and people are starting to notice.
The arrival of the Omicron variant has, yet again, raised the prospect of people being asked to stay at home — not so much to protect each other but, to use the language of lockdowns, to ‘protect the NHS’. Covid-19 is no longer dominating the health service: vaccines work, and patients with the virus currently occupy only 5 per cent of hospital beds, a far cry from 31 per cent in January. Things are relatively under control — for now.
Still, something is going wrong. In many ways, NHS emergency services are harder to access now than they were last year. The average ambulance wait time (for a non-life-threatening call) is now nearly an hour — twice what it was in the depths of the pandemic. The standard answering time of a 111 call should be 20 seconds. For those in the north-east of England, it’s taking closer to 20 minutes.
Amanda Pritchard, the new chief executive of NHS England, admitted at the start of last month that the NHS was ‘running hot’. So it would seem. Too many GPs are still refusing to see patients in person. In desperation, these patients go to A&E. The emergency wards have become so full that in October, just over 7,000 patients waited more than 12 hours to be admitted. This is more than five times the number in the previous October, when no vaccines were in sight. Ms Pritchard is right to sound the alarm, but she can’t really blame Covid.
So what’s going wrong? In a way, nothing: the NHS is designed to ration health-care, using waiting lists and running hospitals at nearly full capacity. This is why almost every winter the ‘NHS in crisis’ headlines appear. These stories are not really exaggerated: doctors and nurses work ridiculous hours, often in overflowing wards. This is, for political reasons, the way Britain chooses to run its health service: as a top-down bureaucracy, funnelling resources to management and keeping competition at bay. It wastes money and, worse, it costs lives. We’re long overdue a conversation about how to do better for everyone.
Most international studies tend to rank NHS performance as mediocre. A 2019 study of developed countries, published in the Lancet Oncology, showed that the UK has the worst survival rates for five out of seven cancers. The study that tends to be kindest to the NHS, produced by the Commonwealth Fund, recently demoted the UK from first to fourth place. But even in years when the NHS has ranked first overall — out of 11 systems in developed countries — it has consistently ranked near the bottom in the category for patient outcomes. As the Guardian once put it: ‘The only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive.’
How many people? Five years ago, the Institute of Economic Affairs ran the figures. Were UK patients with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancers treated under the German system instead, 12,000 lives would be saved every year. Under Belgium’s system, 14,000 lives. For stroke patients, roughly 3,000 more would survive if they lived in Switzerland. Decades of experience across the world suggest that patients tend to fare better under hybrid systems: where universal access is guaranteed for everyone, but private and charity sector provision work in tandem with the state to ensure the best outcomes for patients.
Two decades ago, it was easier to claim that the NHS’s problem was simply not enough money. When Tony Blair famously sat down on the late David Frost’s television sofa and promised to match Europe’s average for health spending, he made Labour the party of giving more cash to the NHS. The Tories have taken this idea and run wild with it: between 2010 and 2025, the health budget will have increased by 42 per cent — squeezing cash spent elsewhere in government. Schools, by contrast, will be up just 3 per cent. ‘We’re treating NHS investment like it’s paper money,’ says one government source. ‘We put over £5 billion extra into the NHS to give it a six-month boost and no one noticed. Some cabinet ministers don’t even remember it.’
Yet political and public discussion about healthcare refuses to move on from ‘more money’. To propose modernising the NHS is to be accused of selling it off. But if more cash really were the answer to the NHS’s woes, Britain would surely have the best healthcare system in the continent, if not the world.
The problems are most acute now because of the way the NHS shoved non-Covid treatments to one side when the pandemic began. When Sajid Javid became Health Secretary, he revealed that some seven million people had not come forward for health appointments. This is starting to generate more headlines: it was estimated this week that there are between 240,000 and 740,000 missing suspected cancer patients who would have needed an urgent referral.
These are the serious health problems that have been building up. NHS England’s waiting list stands at 5.8 million people — and it will only grow. An investigation by the Spectator’s data team reveals that cardiology appointments fell by nearly a fifth last year, eye treatments by 28 per cent and physiotherapy by almost 40 per cent. General surgeries were down by a quarter; urgent adult mental healthcare down by nearly a sixth. These issues didn’t just magically disappear.
How much of this disruption was inevitable? Lockdowns were a worldwide trend, and virtually every developed country took a major healthcare hit. But the picture now emerging shows that Britain has been hit worse than many others. During the first weeks of lockdown, a survey of oncologists showed cancer appointments in Germany fell by 33 per cent; in Britain, it was 61 per cent. (Germany returned to normal cancer service levels within three months, though they have since slipped again.) Swedish breast cancer referrals were down by about 10 per cent in the first ten months of last year. In Britain, that figure was closer to 30 per cent. Hip replacements were down 10 per cent in Norway last year, 19 per cent in Ireland, 27 per cent in Italy. In England, that figure was 48 per cent. It’s a similar story for knee replacements.
Other nations have also shown signs of faster recovery. Denmark’s system — free at the point of use — managed to actually increase hip and knee operations last year. Had the NHS achieved something similar, our system might today be ‘the envy of the world’. But it hasn’t.
Whenever NHS reform is brought up, a false choice is offered: it’s either the NHS or the USA. This is disingenuous, since virtually every developed country apart from America offers universal access to healthcare. But talk of ‘selling the NHS’ is a quick way to silence any talk of reform, to cover up the fact that in other parts of the world it is market-plus-charity oriented systems that have adapted better (and faster) to crisis mode.
Meanwhile, Johnson has taken political adulation of the NHS to new levels. It was invoked on his Brexit bus, then invoked to ensure compliance with lockdown. The slogan ‘Protect the NHS’ appalled senior figures at the health service — but focus groups showed that people who distrusted the Tories did trust the NHS. ‘Test and trace had nothing to do with us,’ says one senior NHS figure. ‘They used our name to get people to fall in line.’
It’s a tempting crutch for ministers to use. Even Javid, who intentionally forgoes the NHS badge so as to not idolise the service, got swept up in NHS-mania a few weeks ago, tweeting at someone complaining about their vaccine experience: ‘How about you show some respect for the NHS?’
Of course we should thank the doctors. But how much respect does the system deserve, given that it is currently preventing the treatment of the sick, yet still keeps nurses’ pay below their Chilean, not to mention their European, equivalents?
This explains the growing panic inside government: ministers can see the current model is failing, but no one is allowed to publicly point it out. The Health and Social Care Bill passing through the Commons will address few of these issues, as it seeks to further centralise care.
Should it be so dangerous, politically, to say that doctors and patients deserve better?
Speccie 03/12
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,856
Some good points
But of course working over retirement age takes a job away from a youngster who may want a job
Oh Bob
It is correct but it's also right that this govt would prefer a private medicine route
As does the major opposition party
Maybe looking at what the needs are and what we wish to afford
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
victor matcham- Registered: 5 Oct 2021
- Posts: 1,034
The last post is talking rubbish there is over 1 million jobs to fill up and not all are for tradesmen my still offered a job my brother worked till he was 80yrs and he too has been told you want to come back we need you. even in the 1980s when there was not a lot of work around I just packed my bags looked in the Sun news paper saw jobs going in Germany for welders went to London on Tuesday passed the welding test and on Saturday same week found my self in Germany working the following week. But so many vacancies just like it was in the 1950s and talking about tradesmen they can now pick up work and over £600 per week with ease in the UK. But even if you are not a tradesman firms are taking on men and women and training them up and the pay is good even if training, If I was fit my boss told we would have you back even at my 79 years of age because they cannot get the workers. So to say a older person is taking away jobs for the young is rubbish. Yes they have to many air plane staff right now but on the news this morning they are working in the fields on farms, and some have join up the R.A.F as pilots etc .Lot of work out there and with good pay.Firms are taking on anyone even ones pass the retiring age.And part-time to.
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Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
Captain Haddock wrote:1. NHS letter arrives today to book consultant on line.
2. Choice of five hospitals - letter says all see 9 out of 10 patients within
21 weeks.
3. Click on each. No appointment available 'at this time'.
4. Keep clapping?
FWIW been member of Benenden Health for decades but never used them.
'phoned Benenden. Almost immediate e-mail back giving temp BUPA membership and three local consultants to contact.
'phoned consultant's secretary.
Within 10 minutes e-mail back with appointment to see consultant within a fortnight at Canterbury.
Sorted.
victor matcham likes this
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,856
Thankfully iv retired and won't take someone else's job by working past retirement age .
Why would I want to either
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Captain Haddock- Location: Marlinspike Hall
- Registered: 8 Oct 2012
- Posts: 7,922
?t=ZHW76mni2COQK5iGevn26A&s=19
"Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds"
Jan Higgins- Location: Dover
- Registered: 5 Jul 2010
- Posts: 13,797
That is a prime example of poor top management by not focusing on really important actual health issues.
Matey, Brian Dixon and Captain Haddock like this
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I try to be neutral and polite but it is hard and getting even more difficult at times.
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