[Misc] How can the NHS survive in its current form ?

[sydney]

Mate I'm not accusing anyone of lying. People do communicate false facts, though. I remember once it being reported on the BBC (so I thought O heard) that Battersea dogs home put down 100,000 dogs a year. The real figure is 1,200. And yet I repeated the false information for several years.

I have now done some research. This recent paper is a global survey. It does not contain UK data. However it is clear that the vaccine refusal rate would appear to be around 20% lower in a range of nations, from developed to primative. The reasons given are ALL spurious: "The major reasons for COVID-19 vaccine refusal were concerns about vaccine safety, side effects, and efficacy; misinformation and lack of knowledge; and mistrust in experts, authorities, or pharmaceutical companies.": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8876951/

And frankly, even if 50% of nurses refused the vaccine that does not make them right. And having refused the vaccine their chances of catching covid and passing it on to their patients would increase dramatically. We know the vaccine works. We know that its ADR risks are low. The rest is bollocks.

A refusal to be vaccinated and an insistence on being able to work with the sick and elderly is on a par with refusing to arrive at work on time, refusing to not have a couple of pints at lunch time. Worse, in fact, because more people would have died (during the first year of the pandemic).

So, you have then gone on to conflate these poor 'oppressed' nurses with some sort of global 'f***ed over' conspiracy. That's just wrong. You're not a teenager. You have travelled and experienced life. For some unknown reason your conflating fact and fantasy into a justification for advocating...what? Being an antisocial dick? "I'm a nurse and I'll do what I like?". Well, then, you can't be a nurse.

I can only assume you have stuff on your mind. I have a bit of stuff on my mind right now, healthwise, but I will strive to maintain some sort of grip. Largely people are trying to do what they feel is the right thing. That's what people generally do. Mistakes can be made. This includes over Covid (Hand-on-cock sending people back to care homes to be exposed to Covid by the peripatetic minimum wage staff, and die, was one standout mistake; spaffing billions on fraudulent scams, often created by the mates of MPs, was another). Creating rules around Covid vaccination was most certainly not.

I am not contesting your other gripes. Unfortunately our voters are now addicted to an almost game showy process of selecting their MPs, and, as I always say, we get the governments we deserve. With an increasingly heavy heart I am still hopeful that Starmer may sort things out if he gets in, although his plan (if true) to allow patients to contact specialists direct is unworkable. I'm hoping he has been misinterpreted.

Anyway, take it easy. I'll read your other reply (bracing myself for another rant) shortly

nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html

quite...!! my point is i was against people being forced to be jabbed to keep their jobs regardless of what that job may be , hope you are well mate

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html

quite...!! my point is i was against people being forced to be jabbed to keep their jobs regardless of what that job may be , hope you are well mate

Ironically I'm normally blighted with perpetual winter 'ear nose and throat' this time of year. None of that, but I can barely walk due to spine, hip and knee problems. If only there were a vaccine for all of that.... .

And you, too, young man.

 

[Weststander]

At 1:38 here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001n8vd

Mrs.W has worked many roles in the NHS and says that this caller summed up the key issue. 25 years ago all practitioners were dedicated to a GP surgery, they worked collaboratively in real time, holistic patient treatment could be arranged there and then. No more.

Without that it's everyone ploughing a lonely furrow, giving avoidable delays to patients and being so inefficient costing a fortune.

 

[goldstone]

No, the NHS cannot survive in its present form.

As for your former neighbour, I suggest she should have been told to lose weight before being admitted to hospital.

 

[Icy Gull]

I can only speak from experience but I am in awe of how NHS staff maintain their efficiency, empathy and sense of humour with each other and patients.

Big for Worthing from me

 

[stewart12]

I’ve always wondered the kind of people that work in the NHS away from the front line. The wages are generally a lot lower than equivalent roles in the private sector and with all the restrictions / red tape that goes with it. Always fascinated the kind of people they take these jobs

I've done a few NHS admin jobs when I've been in between jobs. It's very easy to get an admin job either on a permanent or bank basis (I still get emails about bank jobs, there's loads going). The pay was ok and it was a stress free role.

If you stick around you can rise up through the ranks quite quickly which is probably why people do exactly that. The department I worked in had quite a few people on a decent banding who had just got there by talking a good game and by simply not leaving

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

No, the NHS cannot survive in its present form.

As for your former neighbour, I suggest she should have been told to lose weight before being admitted to hospital.

I trust you were nice and slim when you had your lobotomy?

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

No-one forced you, you had the right to refuse but you didn't.

Not 100% correct, the direction of travel at the time was you could lose your job, you wont be able to travel and you wont be able to do anything without it.

Whilst you are correct, you had the right to refuse, it was not as simple as that

 

[Tim Over Whelmed]

I have to say my experience of the NHS has been superb. Prompt treatment, two long stays (6 weeks each) and couldn't have been better. However, a member of our family is studying for her degree as a paramedic, during her three years she does twelve hour shifts on an ambulance, a ward or a specialist area, and this adds up to 2,400 unpaid hours. She has to travel to do this so has the cost of travel plus the car parking charges, which I think is obscene. She also will need to pay for her C1 (blue light) licence, at around £1,500, although some NHS trusts refund, some don't.

 

[Weststander]

I have to say my experience of the NHS has been superb. Prompt treatment, two long stays (6 weeks each) and couldn't have been better. However, a member of our family is studying for her degree as a paramedic, during her three years she does twelve hour shifts on an ambulance, a ward or a specialist area, and this adds up to 2,400 unpaid hours. She has to travel to do this so has the cost of travel plus the car parking charges, which I think is obscene. She also will need to pay for her C1 (blue light) licence, at around £1,500, although some NHS trusts refund, some don't.

Astonishing. All costs should be met.

 

[Blue3]

The Tories voted against the very conception of the NHS and deep down have never wanted it much preferring an insurance system.
So popular was the NHS with the public that between 1948 and the 1980s that none of the political parties would dream of any major changes and in fact it became a bit of a competition come elections which party was bidding to put the most funds into it.
it started to change when Thatcher came to power and I am share it would have been completely disassembled then but for so many other issues Miners, Falklands, Northern Ireland, the EU to name a few, instead she settled with doing away with NHS regions the setting up of a competitive market within the NHS and opening the door to private companies entering the NHS market.
New Labour (Tory Lite) continued and expanded this outscouring however to their credit they massively invested in the NHS over an 8 year period
We then had the collapse of the banks and ten years of austerity which absolutely crippled the NHS and in fact austerity was never lifted for the NHS then Brexit when 15,000 members of staff up and went home as they no longer felt wanted 6,000 of which were GP’s followed by the pandemic after which many thousands chose to take early retirement.
which brings us to the present and we find an NHS that is massively understaffed with incredible backlogs in old buildings and many of its services being provided by private healthcare companies for profit.
Can the NHS survive in its current form the answer is no of course it cannot when the real question is what do we want how is it likely to compared to what we will have.

 

[Goldstone Guy]

Treat everyone on medical need and without prejudice.

Who decides what a person's medical need is? The person themselves or the health professional? At the moment in this country in a lot of cases it's the person (in my experience, I don't have data to prove it). So in these cases, really the NHS isn't trying to provide what a person needs, but rather what they want (or think they need). One reason (of many) why the waiting lists are massive and the NHS can't cope.

 

[jackanada]

It can't survive in its current form, because it's current form is specifically designed for it not to.
It could survive in its previous form perfectly adequately though.
Every stage of profit taking has worsened the service and increased the drain on the public purse.
The early outsourcing of cleaning and catering lowered outcomes at no cost saving and gave us an explosion of MRSA, all the way through to the great debacle of NHS IT and record keeping which has only succeeded in flogging patient data and lining pockets while the staff work around it with WhatsApp. The legion of draining PFI contracts for everything from buildings to beds.
Camerons reforms which added at least £2billion pa to NHS admin costs but which did enable more services to be outsourced - to providers that had already proved both inadequate and overpriced.
There is so much grift introduced by the Tories (and a bit by Blair) it is impossible to list it all. Perhaps the most egregious is that when I and others give up our time to give blood that by the time it gets to a hospital a profit has been made on it, presuming of course it doesn't get made into blood products and sold abroad.
So enough of all the blather about we can't afford it, what we can't afford is to line the pockets of private equity, and we definitely can't afford a US model because that just means the same amount of government money being spent to cover only a fraction of the population while rinsing everyone who can afford health insurance and bankrupting them if they do get seriously ill.
Of course your wealthy "I'm alright Jack" type thinks it's all tickety boo with his private GP and nice private room for a minor procedure. He doesn't realise that having an NHS keeps his premiums about 5 times lower than they would be, that should something go wrong with his op its the NHS that's going to be providing the expertise to save him, and that if he gets a chronic condition he's not getting renewal and it's the NHS he's dependent on.

 

[Commander]

My Dad, long-term NSC poster @Cadiz Seagull is currently on the Stroke ward at the Sussex County with a suspected stroke. The new building and the care he has received in it has been absolutely fantastic, I can’t fault it.

But A&E, my God. I cannot describe how awful it was. I counted 24 people on trolleys in the corridor on Monday, and those were the only ones I could see from my viewpoint, there were a lot more. He was in a cubicle with two other people on beds at one point. So three people to a cubicle, and probably 50+ people piled up on trolleys in the corridors, and a full waiting room. It was literally like a war zone, and when I say ‘literally’ I do genuinely mean ‘literally’. I just couldn’t get my head around how this is happening in Britain in 2023. There is absolutely no excuse for it whatsoever. I was looking at people passed out on the trolleys thinking if they die nobody will know for hours. It’s absolutely appalling that a country like ours has let its emergency healthcare get in that state. I’m still genuinely shocked by it.

 

[Goldstone Guy]

My Dad, long-term NSC poster @Cadiz Seagull is currently on the Stroke ward at the Sussex County with a suspected stroke. The new building and the care he has received in it has been absolutely fantastic, I can’t fault it.

But A&E, my God. I cannot describe how awful it was. I counted 24 people on trolleys in the corridor on Monday, and those were the only ones I could see from my viewpoint, there were a lot more. He was in a cubicle with two other people on beds at one point. So three people to a cubicle, and probably 50+ people piled up on trolleys in the corridors, and a full waiting room. It was literally like a war zone, and when I say ‘literally’ I do genuinely mean ‘literally’. I just couldn’t get my head around how this is happening in Britain in 2023. There is absolutely no excuse for it whatsoever. I was looking at people passed out on the trolleys thinking if they die nobody will know for hours. It’s absolutely appalling that a country like ours has let its emergency healthcare get in that state. I’m still genuinely shocked by it.

I'm sorry about your dad. Hope he makes a swift recovery.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Who decides what a person's medical need is? The person themselves or the health professional? At the moment in this country in a lot of cases it's the person (in my experience, I don't have data to prove it). So in these cases, really the NHS isn't trying to provide what a person needs, but rather what they want (or think they need). One reason (of many) why the waiting lists are massive and the NHS can't cope.

To answer your question health professionals.

 

[One Teddy Maybank]

I’ve always wondered the kind of people that work in the NHS away from the front line. The wages are generally a lot lower than equivalent roles in the private sector and with all the restrictions / red tape that goes with it. Always fascinated the kind of people they take these jobs

Very good pension, for those of us on the 95 scheme.

 

[One Teddy Maybank]

I've done a few NHS admin jobs when I've been in between jobs. It's very easy to get an admin job either on a permanent or bank basis (I still get emails about bank jobs, there's loads going). The pay was ok and it was a stress free role.

If you stick around you can rise up through the ranks quite quickly which is probably why people do exactly that. The department I worked in had quite a few people on a decent banding who had just got there by talking a good game and by simply not leaving

Actually, the higher you go like any employer, the harder it gets, as there are fewer roles and it’s more competitive.

 

[One Teddy Maybank]

My Dad, long-term NSC poster @Cadiz Seagull is currently on the Stroke ward at the Sussex County with a suspected stroke. The new building and the care he has received in it has been absolutely fantastic, I can’t fault it.

But A&E, my God. I cannot describe how awful it was. I counted 24 people on trolleys in the corridor on Monday, and those were the only ones I could see from my viewpoint, there were a lot more. He was in a cubicle with two other people on beds at one point. So three people to a cubicle, and probably 50+ people piled up on trolleys in the corridors, and a full waiting room. It was literally like a war zone, and when I say ‘literally’ I do genuinely mean ‘literally’. I just couldn’t get my head around how this is happening in Britain in 2023. There is absolutely no excuse for it whatsoever. I was looking at people passed out on the trolleys thinking if they die nobody will know for hours. It’s absolutely appalling that a country like ours has let its emergency healthcare get in that state. I’m still genuinely shocked by it.

To be fair it’s been like it a long time, arguably from the 90s onwards, I used to do a lot of work in A&E.

In the last few years undoubtedly it has worsened, but that is basically because more people are coming through the front door, and not enough patients leaving to free up beds, due to a complete lack of adequate social care provision.

You then add more risk averse Doctors into the equation and you have the current shitshow.

Actually, when John Major’s Patient’s Charter was introduced, and there was more emphasis on trolley waits, things improved for a spell.

Stephen Barclay is the worse possible thing that could have happened to the NHS, has a little knowledge and is basically talking out his arse in the main.

 

[One Teddy Maybank]

Astonishing. All costs should be met.

Most if not all NHS staff have to pay parking.

Certainly, locally, that has been in the place for 30 years.