The NHS is frightening (UK)

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I really do not know what's going on with the NHS lately, but lots of desperate people aren't receiving the help they need, and we can't afford to go private.

I won't go into too much detail but there are people in my family with physical and emotional problems that just constantly get rejected by services run by the NHS. Even I tried to see the doctor to get tested for cancer (just to put my mind at rest), but there are no available appointments for the next 2 months.
My brother is suffering severely with mental health problems and is having trouble finding work, but the mental health team just wrote him off.
Whenever you do help yourself by getting in touch with services that promise they can help, they just pass you on to another service, until you get passed on to where you started. Then you give up in the end.
The waiting time at the hospital for my mum is 3 hours, when she waits to have her cancer treatment or a scan. And she never sees the same nurse, and her key worker nurse she liked and could talk to has left, and there are staff-shortages everywhere, surgeries are closing down...

It's awful. I don't know why the NHS has become so shoddy. The only people who get the right services and support are those who are rich and can afford to go private. Otherwise, us NHS users are just treated like we're not important.

Basically the rules of living in the UK are:-
Don't get ill
Don't get old
Don't be poor

f**k you Theresa May and all the other rich conservative MPs. All they do is waste our taxes and not spend it on what's really important. Soon the UK is going to become a third-world country if they don't do something soon.

It frightens me.

there is life in third world countries. i live in one. rules are exactly like that, plus a couple addendums. im sorry if i am not cheering u up. thats all i can do.

I am sorry, as well. The UK's NHS is an example of what you get when Socialism takes over the medical-care industry. Some people here in the States are pushing for something similar, thinking that it will make medical care more affordable for everyone.

More affordable, maybe ... but certainly less accessible.

I know this doesn't help, but it's hard to keep someone from drowning when your own boat is sinking too.

This sort of thing is why the US is reluctant to create a "national insurance" sort of scheme. They fear that their overall quality of care will decline as a result. They fear the creation of a massive bureaucracy on top of all the other massive bureaucracies.

Still, I believe, especially in catastrophic cases, that "national insurance" is essential.

There was an article in the Washington Post about this yesterday.

Source: The fraying edges of universal health care

The Guardian reported, “Patients who are losing their sight are being forced to wait for months before having eye cataracts removed because of NHS cost-cutting. … The NHS has imposed restrictions on patients’ access to cataract surgery in more than half of England. … The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) condemned the rationing as shocking. It warned that not treating people with cloudy vision risks them falling and breaking bones, thus costing the NHS more.”

Last year, The New York Times reported some people in England were waiting for 12 hours to be seen in emergency rooms.

“Some doctors took to Twitter to vent their frustrations publicly. One complained of having to practice ‘battlefield medicine,’ while another apologized for the ‘3rd world conditions’ caused by overcrowding,” the newspaper reported.

This is what happens when “the government” is paying for health care — people become the budget. Inevitably, the individual becomes nothing more than a budget item to be deemed worthy … or not.

In England, rationing is established by NHS clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), which determine which procedures have “value.” As an example, “Of the 195 NHS clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England, 104 now include cataract removal on their list of ‘procedures of limited clinical value,’ according to research by the Medical Technology Group.”

Many CCGs have determined hernia repair is no longer something patients can automatically have, while dozens have declared knee and hip replacements as also not necessarily possible, the Guardian said.

Why does a civilized Western country deliberately allow thousands of its citizens to go blind? Julie Wood, chief executive for NHS clinical commissioners, explained to the Times of London: “The NHS does not have unlimited resources. Ensuring patients get the best possible care against a backdrop of spiraling demands, competing priorities and increasing financial pressures is one of the biggest issues clinical commissioners face.”

Health insurance, especially when completely controlled by the government, isn’t about who gets health care, it’s about who doesn’t. It is the ultimate in population control.

Actually, Fnord, the NHS is going to hell because they are trying to make it more like the US. New Public Management is destroying it.

I'm sorry Joe. I try to follow UK news, and it's not very cheerful these days. I hope the dismantling of the state will lead to some sort of reaction, that people will start appreciating what they once had.

There, fixed it for you. Don't even try to blame the U.S. for the feck-ups running the U.K. government.

I mean, what with Brexit, and all...

Any sort of large-scale bureaucracy---no matter American, British, or whatever--is always going to have major problems.

I would blame, mostly, the sheer size of the bureaucracy for its problems.

I've grown up with the NHS and I must say it used to be a lot more reliable than it is now. In fact my mum has noticed it deteriorate in the last year, and become worse in the last 5 or 6 months.

How was it 10-15 years ago?

I sense it has had its ups and downs.

It's true that people have to complain about it in order for stuff to be done about it.

I've actually been hearing complaints about the NHS----even on here----since I started coming on here.

It's cuts to the NHS that make the NHS inefficient. When it was well funded, it was efficient.

Yes it's awful

We're going to experience the effect of "cuts" here in the US, too. And it ain't going to be pretty.

I remember feeling very concerned at the state of the NHS around 1996, towards the end of an 18-year spell of Conservative government. I recall very long waits to get seen, and encountered one or two younger doctors who didn't seem to have much idea what they were doing. Things improved noticeably after 1997 - I was no fan of the Tony Blair Labour government, but they did seem to provide a lot of extra funding. I get the impression that things have been back on a downward path in recent years. Many aspects of the service have been semi-privatized: not only do patients get stung for using the privately-run hospital car parks,but so do even the medical staff. A lot of procedures, like cancer scans, have been contracted out to private firms, who make the NHS pay through the nose for them.

One thing the former Labour government got wrong was building new hospitals via the Private Finance Initiative (PFI): under these schemes, the private sector got to build and run new hospitals over 30 or 40 year contracts, and charge outrageous fees for their services. I recall a case where the PFI firm charged over £900 to adjust a TV aerial, and another firm was supplying a jar of skin cream, which sells for about £5 in the shops, for £1500.

The government minister (Lansley) who introduced a recent set of privatizing 'reforms',was on the board of directors of one of the firms who benefitted from this. He appeared on the TV show Question Time a few years ago, and wondered why the audience laughed when he explained that he was paid £25,000 for working 10 days per year at this company.

The notion that Socialism has taken over medical care in the UK is mistaken. The reason for the decline of the NHS is if anything exactly the opposite - it is being broken up and farmed out to private interest almost by the minute. Interesting that you refer to medical care as an 'industry': The NHS is not an industry, it's a service but in a way you're right, it is being treated as an industry, i.e. something that must make money, to the extent that hospital land is being sold off all over the country.

The NHS is chronically under-funded and therefore under-staffed but continues to be a priceless resource for those of us who have had recourse to it in our lives. It deserves so much more than our current political establishment chooses to give it and things are only set to get worse as we deliberately choose to make it more difficult for those from other countries to come and work in it as we plunge off the cliff that is called Brexit.

Last edited by envirozentinel on 11 Apr 2019, 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.: Personal remarks removed

Personal attacks noted and reported.

What are you talking about? I'm not blaming the US for making UK policy. I'm blaming the UK government for combining the worst of both systems. They make you wait for help (universal healthcare) and then tell you you can't have any (US "healthcare").

Never mind, this is the Haven, and I can't be arsed to get into a fight about this. You can have the last word if you want it.