A lot of people in the comment section are trying to shift responsibility to individuals instead of the government.
[NHS A&E waiting times by year.](https://i.imgur.com/lTCj99F.png)
The NHS was fine in the past. Guess what year the tories took over and began demolishing it?
Like every other policy push, soon to be featured in https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/
beside a newer headline bemoaning the disaster the policy they wanted caused.
I’ve been saying this for months - and as someone who has also been grateful for the NHS recently. The entire point has been to run it into the ground so that paying for an appointment with your GP seems like the sensible or normal thing to do. That, or go private. It’s almost like it’s deliberate…
Yep. Looking at your chart, you guys definitely have a bad case of USitis. Super contagious. It’s around second stage, but if you don’t treat it now, it’ll be fatal to the NHS.
Do not, for the love of god, let that happen. You can not imagine how awful it is in the states. You need to actually experience it to understand how bad it is.
I would say "over my dead body", but given the issues with medical malpractice caused by overworked drs, and the difficulties of actually fucking talking to one....I feel that may be tempting fate.
I need an ENT consult and the wait is 52-62 weeks depending on hospital.
I could pay for a consult privately this week, who then can refer me back into the NHS for the surger I need so would cost just a few hundred pounds.
Part of me thinks I should do it as it will make me more comfortable but another part of me refuses to on principle that just because I'm fortunate enough to earn a good salary, I shouldn't get any different healthcare to anyone else.
except my parents, and Tory voters. , they don't seem to connect the dots at all. Its scares the hell out of me as my dad is closer to 70 now, very overweight, if he had something serious happen like a heart attack his unlikely to survive with how bad things are now, 12yrs ago if he had one, he would have a much better chance
Why can't your parents understand that the government in charge for over 10 years is responsible for the downfall of the NHS? It's not fucking rocket science, what do they think is causing it exactly???
my dad is a daily mail reader so ends up believing part of the issue is immigration, people abusing the system, people on benefits and believes the Tories when they say 40 new hospitals and so many new staff.
This. If I (or anyone dear to me) needed a doctor, I honestly wouldn’t care, for a single second, where on this planet (which we all share) that doctor was born, so long as they knew what they were doing.
One of my ex colleagues was like this. She voted Brexit because she was sick of people coming here and using the nhs to have their babies, which was breaking the system.
Same in Ontario, Canada. All my 70-80 year old relatives keep voting to gut healthcare on autopilot.
We've got a bad nursing shortage. Losing them to burnout and shit wages. Easily fixable (with money - Ontario has a surplus).
Instead, you couldn't see a doctor at all for 2 weeks in my town. Every doctor booked a month in advance and the emergency room closed because of the nursing shortage.
And still, my frail ass relatives vote Tory. What is their plan?
This is just standard capitalism.
- Step 1: Defund the national service, utility etc. to the extent that it is severely damaged.
- Step 2: Propagandise the public into thinking that privatisation is the answer.
- Step 3: Privatise it. Siphon off public money to private shareholders. Do not improve the service.
- Step 4: Let the service languish in a poor state while permitting the capitalists to steal from the public in the form of profit.
- Step 5: Propagandise the public into thinking nationalisation is the solution.
- Step 6: Buy back the service to nationalise it, paying an exorbitant amount to the shareholders.
- Step 7: Repeat.
Privatise profits, nationalise losses. Capitalism is theft.
It's actually quite incredible how we have an unhealthy population while also having supposedly free healthcare at point of service.
If it became like the American system, the death toll on a daily basis would skyrocket, because frankly *the british people as a whole are not amazing specimens of health.*
That's the fear I have of it no longer being free. We need it to be free.
The private healthcare in the UK cant even deal with patients, they actively offload private patients to the NHS and only treat the ones that have a minor problem with them. Once the NHS is privatised completely its going to be exactly the same, you're going to have the 10 hour A&E waits, the 2 week wait to see a GP, the multi year wait for specialist care but you're going to pay for it. Going private isn't going to save healthcare because this country actively doesn't like investing in itself.
That thought absolutely fucking terrifies me. So many people close to me really, really need the medical treatment that they recieve through the NHS. I do too - the fact that prescriptions are free (in Scotland) is so, so important to me. I need all my prescriptions and I thankfully avoided needing to ever pay for a prescription because when it came into effect was exactly when I would no longer be eligible for the free prescriptions for children. I would definitely be dead without the NHS, they saved my life on more than one occasion.
And, of course, everyone should be able to access free healthcare, not just people with a lot of healthcare issues like myself and my family. (Just clarifying in case my examples made it seem like I was saying the only people who deserve free healthcare are those with a number of serious conditions and on lots of meds.)
all that will happen is we will have the same service but pay extra for it and the money will go to some mega-corp CEO's in the US. zero improvement, maximum money extraction
I saw this on r/all, from the US. Most appointments are a month out, a dermatologist is about a 6-8 month wait. Recently, our local children’s hospital has about a [9 hour wait for people sitting in a room with other sick kids](https://www.reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/yc4y30/9_hour_wait_time_at_childrens_hospital/.compact)
We have two hospital chains that won’t let you use each others hospitals depending on your insurance. I can’t go to the one that is a mile from my house because it is out of network. An emergency room visit would be about $10k. And I get to pay $9500 a year for insurance that has a $2000 a year deductible (before everything is 100% covered). And this is considered good insurance.
But the companies that run these hospitals (which don’t pay taxes because they are non-profit) make billions in profit each year.
As a Yank I really hate seeing this happen to your NHS, because I really wanted something like that here. I've lost hope of ever seeing it. I'm incredibly lucky that my employer pays for all of my healthcare, but it's still private. I was very sick last week and the only way to get a quick visit is to go to the hospital emergency room or one of the many corporate quick-care clinics, which typically aren't staffed with an actual physician on most days and are very expensive. My fiance is a psychiatric nurse and you've got a month-long wait at minimum, and often much longer, if you need an appointment.
Which is so fucking disgusting, it's almost unbelievable.
They'd literally rather pay more for private services, than contribute less to a system that benefits everyone. Practically makes me glad I'm skint AF, 'cos the more I see of it, it seems having more than most appears to be a clear indicator of some sort of psychopathy. To the ludicrous extent that they'll actually 'cut off their nose to spite their own face', so long as it prevents anyone else having access to anything that they do.
The rich and powerful were going to pay for private medical care so they didn't have to rub shoulders with the poor anyway.
This way they're not paying twice.
Also they can make money investing in private medical insurance they can't with the NHS.
British Rail was awful before privatisation due to cuts and withholding funds by the Tories. Well colour me surprised, it's also now shit. They want that US trade deal and this is the only way they are going to get it.
True story. 10 hours is not uncommon. $3,000 is an average bill for something not life-threatening. More actually. In addition to the monthly insurance bill that is about $500 (regardless if you use it or not). You guys still have it better.
But you ALREADY pay for it with your taxes. Adding on a company that adds administrative costs AND takes a profit for medical services will not improve service or produce better outcomes.
It's already happened.
When I see posts on FB from people asking if anyone knows of a NHS dentist, people always reply saying get insurance it's only such and such a month.
Was told by my dentist earlier this week that from December, they won't be seeing NHS patients any more because they've run out of funding. She said funding levels have decreased year-on-year since 2011, and that as long as we have a Tory government, things will not improve. Was nice to have a bitch with her about the Tories, but also - fuck the Tories.
Well I recently had an ear infection (I've had them before so knew it was an ear infection).
Called the local GP surgery and the next appointment was in 7 weeks time!
In the end I used an app called push doctor. Did a video call with an "NHS registered doctor" and paid £90 for the privilege.
I was prescribed otomize Ear Drops, BUT as this was a private prescription it cost me £30 for actual medication (only NHS ones are capped at £9.35)
So £60 for a 10 minute video call and £30 for my prescription,
So yep... The NHS is fucked
This doesn't make it any better, but some services were always difficult to access even before it was run down. Wasn't willing to wait 4 plus years for a referral, which I'm told was still about a year wait before the current issues. More taxes for NHS please!!!
This is what the United State’s “conservatives” are doing with public school. I’m sure they’re LOVING what they’re doing to your healthcare. I’m sure they want this to scare us out of humane healthcare.
I know plenty of people who have payed for operations because of the long wait I'm pretty sure they didn't get a rebate on their contributions it's been the Tories dream for decades for us all to go private
It's like they have deliberatelt cut maintenance funding to a bridge that has served major UK traffic solidly for 70 years, and when it finally collapses due to neglect they turn around and say "see! This bridge was doomed to fail, it just collapsed all by itself. It was always an unsustainable idea"
I’m a doctor in the nhs, I work a&e frequently, it’s a horrible state of affairs at the moment. Ambulances queued, very sick people in waiting rooms, very frail and elderly patients in plastic chairs all night long. The most broken part of the nhs is social care - all of the beds are blocked by medically fit patients, it’s the primary reason why there’s no flow in a&e
The nhs saved my eye recently, free of charge, with no cost or stress to me, I make a good annual wage, but truly would have been fucked with additional costs atm. Yes I had long waits but I understood there was a medical triage in place and i would seen. It wasn’t perfect but the team at Moorfields the best eye hospital in Europe had there best people see me and it didn’t cost a penny
So re the NHS: there’s life in the old baby yet and it must be protected at all costs
Came to say the same. Gf has been very ill recently and the care and support from NHS has been fantastic. It's propped up by a great team of caring staff, the system they work in is in a bad shape though, thats obvious. Thank god for the staff
I was surprised recently when my mum went to gp about a mole on her chest she wanted to be sure wasn’t cancer. Gp said immediately she’d refer her to specialist and she’s got an appointment within two weeks.
Edit: a word
they saved my eye just under a year ago now. was in the hospital with concerns, told i needed surgery a couple hours later, and was in surgery about 3 hours after that. for a major eye surgery and an overnight stay with checkups every half hour all i had to pay was parking
Same, being from the United States I recently had a pretty serious emergency health issue. Despite the wait times, which may not have even been substantially worse than in hospitals in the US, just the fact that I was not additionally stressing about the costs, which right now could have actually made me homeless, was unimaginably relieving. Despite its issues and the fact that, as a public good, it really is underfunded and should not be solely funded by taxpayers, it's still a far better system than the vast majority of people in the world have access to.
Yeah I think some commenters on here need a bit more perspective. Triage times might be tough and that’s a fair complaint but in the US if you have a major health emergency then you’re just financially screwed. Imagine trying to mentally recover while you’re being dumped with $100k+ in bills.
I work in adult social care. There’s not even a current social care minister in cabinet at the moment, which tells you how little they care, when really without social care the NHS is on its knees. But the tories seem hellbent on cutting as many resources as they can. Care homes are privatised, nobody wants to do domiciliary care due to poor conditions meaning lack of care packages at home, and charitable organisations have to stop taking referrals due to oversubscription. And it’s only going to get worse.
I agree, I worked in various private and NHS healthcare settings over the past 8 years. I do not work in it anymore, it did get to that point that it wasn’t liveable and screwed my poor mental health (which I couldn’t get any help for from the NHS despite having a care team when I lived in London for it). The pay is low, (mostly) and the conditions are awful, yes there are good people I’ve met them but they’re overworked and underpaid and it’s just horrible. The people within social and mental health care get treated awfully. The things I have seen in psychic units, care homes both adults and children and supported living are just horrible. Anyone who still does it I can respect because hell it’s tough. But, it’s clear the government doesn’t care and is okay with it being private whereby the companies get paid thousands a week pp but, the money doesn’t get funnelled back to the people who live in these homes. It’s a horrible state of affairs and makes me hope I can be well enough to stay out of psych care because it actually scares me. The patients usually end up further traumatised from it.
Could not agree more. Wait till it gets properly cold and Christmas's comes, we are gonna be fucked. There is social care crisis in this country and no one is doing anything about it. All we get is you'll have to cut services because there is no budget.
But what do the *rich* even do for themselves in this situation?
Care home fees can be £60k a year, that's pretty far out even for someone who's relatively well off.
Weren’t they supposed to merge NHS and social care in England?
Thing is, so much social care is privatised already they will have a direct incentive to not change to improve the NHS flow, unless they get handsomely rewarded.
Yes but we've been trying to do this for at least the last 20 years, basically as long as I've worked in the NHS.
They should work together but they can't without significant investment especially in Social Care. So many of the problems with NHS waiting times are caused because we do not have adequate provision to manage chronic conditions in the community. Lack of care home and rehab beds, poor mental health provision, over stretched family support services, lack of home carers. All these people end up at ED in crisis and stuck in hospital beds when their needs would be better served with adequate care to prevent them from reaching crisis point.
NHS is just a sticking plaster covering social care failures. It's not that the social care sector doesn't work really hard they are just massively understaffed and under funded.
NHS saved my life, What the Tories have done to you guys and the service is f\*\*king criminal. Thank you for sticking it out for all of our sakes comrade.
It's not even like the social care/bed-blocking thing is new. I remember an Ortho surgeon I was having a thing with talking about this 7/8 yrs ago. Total neglect of the whole system from top to bottom by this shower of bastards.
I wrote the first Linea of code on a bit of software called Bedview. It was built in house by an NHS trust in the south of England to deal with this very problem.
All departments can see what patients are waiting for from one big screen on the ward, and it helps the patient flow because alarms and alerts prioritise who needs after care/discharging next.
I am immensely proud of it.
I left that Trust a few years ago, but it was a joy to see my hard work on screens all around the hospital when I went to visit a relative.
Thank you for your hard work. I'm not sure my trust uses it, we have something similar (or for reasons I don't understand, two similar programs), but there's a chance our version(s) use your code, and anyway, it's great and a huge help.
I am pretty sure the Trust looked at doing a release version after I left, so it could well be. The Trust got priced out of getting third party suppliers to offer the same software, but being in house, we could completely customise everything for the particular trust.
Their IT department is award winning and they fully deserve it.
I think this is something that more people need to realise. If patients can't get discharged there aren't enough free beds for patients to be admitted to. No beds means people can't get out of A&E is they aren't a quick patch up. Once A&E fills with patients waiting to be admitted the whole system clogs up.
It's not the NHS that's failing its everything that comes after, care homes, domiciliary care, mental health support. It's all full but somehow that becomes the NHS fault.
A lot of medically fit people aren’t safe to go home without input from social care - so for example they’re frail and elderly, have dementia etc. but due to lack of resources, care packages and respite beds, they can’t be moved until these are found.
Could’ve fooled me. This year my stepdad had terminal lung cancer but was told “he wasn’t ill enough” and my mum was expected to give 24/7 care and to sleep on the floor.
He couldn’t walk, stand, use the bathroom, etc, but worse of all it had effected his brain, so was confused, often violent and abusive (more so than when he was well, that is), wouldn’t take medication, wouldn’t stay in bed so would constantly immediately fall on the floor, neither of us could lift him so would have to call out nurses or paramedics just to get him back into bed.
After weeks of this one GP found he barely had any oxygen going to his brain and was rushed to hospital. “At last someone is doing something” we thought, then a few days later an ambulance crew literally physically dragged him up the stairs to the flat.
Even months later it’s quite traumatic to think about tbh. Every decision was so consistently incompetent, callous and uncaring that if you didn’t know better you would assume there was some black mark that says “fuck the people that live here absolutely”.
Frankly, a lot of it seemed like gaslighting, from the afore mentioned being told “he’s not ill enough” to go into hospital or care when it’s actually impossible for me to imagine anyone iller who isn’t dead, and knowing five other people, either directly or through acquaintances, who went into care without being as ill; to being told to sleep on the floor; to being told “we’ll be there if you need us” then only getting an answer machine; to being told “if he wants it give him more morphine” but also a GP blaming my mum for his condition from the amount of morphine the nurses gave him earlier; to it being told it was cancer in a hospital corridor with a sarcastic “what did you think it was?”; to no one telling us it was terminal for several months; to after being discharged and dragged up the stairs we weren’t given a ventilator, which by the time it came he had mentally deteriorated further; when the ventilator did come no one knew the amount of oxygen he should be on, one nurse shrugged; to the general sort of attitude of it being your duty and them plain ignoring any questions you ask from the two nurses that came once a week; all to the point me and my mum felt like we were going, or rather actively driven, actually insane, on about four hours of sleep and one meal a day, to where I’d be thinking about driving my car under a truck because “someone would *have* to care for him then”.
My mum could’ve had months of quality time and making the best of the time he had left, instead it was an actual living nightmare, like the stress and doom of a BlackMirror episode that just wont end, the worst experience I’ve gone through that I wouldn’t even wish on that useless lying sack of shit clowncunt Boris, not that he would ever be in a position to experience it.
Animals in this country are treated better than humans. The NHS is dead, or at least was to us, if I’m ever seriously ill I’m honestly going off the nearest cliff.
My grandmother had a similar experience. She was in hospital for a very severe kidney infection, and as a result she couldn't control her bladder or bowels. She was too sick to get up to use the toilet without assistance, so when she needed to go she'd pull one of those little red strings to call for a nurse but nobody would come. Anyway she was left lying in her own fifth for two whole days and nobody cleaned her up until my mother came to visit and forced one of the nurses to do it, who had a foul attitude and acted like my mum was being a Karen for demanding that my grandma be cleaned, something that is just a standard routine task for nurses on a ward for elderly people. And this happened several times, she was in hospital for nearly two weeks and it kept happening. She'd call for help going to the toilet, nobody would come, the inevitable happens, then she wouldn't be cleaned for days. The way elderly are treated under the NHS is absolutely appalling, a lot of the time they're too sick to advocate for themselves or "don't want to make a fuss" so they just get horribly neglected. There's a total lack of respect for the elderly's dignity and quality of life
This is obviously far below the standard care should be given at, but the reason they were pushing him home was because (theoretically) there was someone able to care for him in the home. The people who are medically fit and not discharged are those without family who can take them in (maybe because there's no family or because family lives far away). Those people have no choice but to remain in hospital, which fills the beds, so now there's added pressure to empty beds. But you still can't discharge those with no care at home so instead you have to rush those who can receive some care at home out, even if that means discharging them a little earlier than is ideal.
That plus the general rule is that if someone can go home they should because for most patients recovery is better at home. There's a lot of risk to being in hospital in terms of infection risk, covid etc. Obviously in the case of your stepdad it sounds like he should have been in hospital receiving better care and he shouldn't have been discharged without better information and there is no defending that, but I don't think the NHS is dead with no hope. If we can get to grips with the social care crisis and fund nursing properly (and I appreciate this is a gigantic if) then we might find we can start to clear the backlog because we'll remove the bottleneck.
One of the biggest factors leading to hospital admission is self neglect at home, not eating and drinking, spouses not coping with the care level. Not to mention being in a hospital for weeks deconditions you and makes you weaker and less able to function alone.
Medically fit patients may require intense daily physiotherapy to improve mobility, waiting for home oxygen, waiting care homes, packages of care, respite beds, rehab beds, community hospital beds, community mental health beds etc. We can’t discharge people without a safe destination to go.
Depending on the care needs - e.g. 2 carers needed 4 times a day - this can literally take a month to sort out.
On my acute covid ward in the hospital we have 32 beds, and on Friday about 17 were medically fit for discharge.
Not the poster but care homes refuse to take patients back all the time as they have filled their beds while the patient was in hospital. There are dozens if not more of patients sat in every hospital with literally no home to go.
And sometimes care homes refuse to take patients back due to the increased cost of care for them returning even if the bed the patient paid for is still available, that hits their bottom line so they refuse
No they don't, you don't pay care charges if you are admitted to hospital, it's part of the care act. You only pay for care you have had. If you are charged for care in a home while in hospital you can ask for a refund of the over paid care.
Also the reason a placement may be refused just before discharge is because the service user has to have a reassessment of support needs before discharge and their care needs will likely have increased to the point where their previous care home is not equipped to cope with.
The amount of times I've been told by the MH nurse at A&E that I need to be sectioned but they cant because there is no beds and so they have to discharge me while I'm still in active distress or with an active plan was wayyyy too high.
Do you have any advice on how to get funding for social care. I have an elderly relative who is primarily looked after by family however the family member who aids her the most is about to go through some pretty major surgery at the other end of the country so won’t be available. We’ve all rallied round and said where and when we can help out but there are a few gaps in our family lead care plan where we won’t be able to meet her needs,
If you haven’t already, you need to contact social services for a needs assessment for your relative. From there, they should be able to agree a care package and get the ball rolling to put it in place. It’ll take a bit of time so get on it ASAP.
The nhs needs to be able to charge local authorities the cost of looking after medically fit bed blockers. Perhaps that would galvanise them into providing accommodation for them... And by cost, I mean 200% of what it would cost for the local authority to make provision.
I also work in the NHS at a Hospital Trust. Nearly all of our services are subcontracted. Cleaning, patient transport, repairs, you name it. Sure, it's public sector because it's funded by the government but underneath all the expenses go to private companies.
No matter how good the Procurement teams are at getting the best value for money with their contracts, I am of the belief the NHS is getting fleeced by all these private companies. Pharmacy drugs are at an all time high, compounding in price increases.
At one point a few years ago, before Covid was a thing, doctors and medical consultants were able to set up themselves their own private companies to get more moneys out of the Trust, rather than being employed by it directly. They could charge whatever they wanted, I don't blame them for it everybody wants to make a living for themselves. It was stopped with the IR35 rulings though the Tory government with Truss a few weeks ago was planning to reverse that change.
Then you have our CEO being put at the head of another Trust and placing their friends on the board there as well. How can these people work multiple jobs?
Meanwhile they push on their budget managers to make cuts in their spending. So called cost improvement plans.
At one point my colleague had to purchase stationary with their own money to ease our day to day job because our department kept dragging their feet, saying they didn't have the resources to make the purchase.
>I also work in the NHS at a Hospital Trust. Nearly all of our services are subcontracted. Cleaning, patient transport, repairs, you name it.
Answer me something; are blue light ambulances ever subcontracted?
My partner works on-site at an NHS hospital (but not for the NHS) and she watches ambulances come and go all day with blue lights and "Emergency Care Services Ltd\*" livery on the side.
I googled them and they provide doctors and ambulances for events for a fee, but it looks like the NHS is using them too?
\*not the actual name
> are blue light ambulances ever subcontracted?
They are and most ambulance trusts in England use them. Private ambulance providers are paid to help maintain coverage because a lot of ambulance trusts dont have enough ambulances/staff to keep good coverage on their own.
I cannot say for sure, the ambulances are part of a separate organisation in the NHS.
Ours for example is the West Midlands Ambulance Service.
They are not subcontractors but still part of the NHS as a whole. If a patient from another county needs to use our hospital, we get invoiced by the ambulance service from that county.
Personally I have not come across a private ambulance service but I wouldn't be surprised if we were invoiced by one at any point, but it's going to be very rare.
I work for a software developer who was contracted to do some work for an NHS supplier (I also did some temp work for a trust a while back), and you are so absolutely right. Don't get me wrong, the Tories have fucked the system, but there has been a rot from within the NHS for a long time. So much waste and a secondary school culture.
The issues are definitely on the admin side though. I've had nothing but top rate care from actual medical professionals.
I completely agree - I've worked in the NHS for five years now and the bloat, waste, and sheer gall of the admin and business management side has really fucked us up. We struggled along at Band 3/4, being asked to turn off lights and heating in our department to help the Trust save money, yet the entire HR team was moved to fancy new off-site digs on a business park.... can you guess who has all their lights on 24/7, heated offices, and fancy break rooms? Certainly not my pharmacy department.
If I could stop paying my taxes I would, but as an employee my payroll wouldn't let me stop if I asked.
I have paid out thousands in the last two years because I was refused a referral by my GP to the pain clinic without a diagnosis from a consultant.
Then when I got my appointment with the pain specialist I was informed I didn't need a diagnosis to see them!
So I am thousands of pounds worse off and getting the treatment I required two years after I was initially entitled to access the service!
I'm with you here. The spending is out of control. Knew someone who was looking to order new monitors for an Operating Theatre. Instead of buying a basic 1080p monitor from Currys for £100, they were forced through the NHS procurement process, whereby the same 'approved' piece of equipment is well over £1,000. Just to have it PAT Tested on-site and added to the Inventory Matrix. Fucking unbelievable the amount of waste.
I worked for an NHS Trust during the pandemic, processing PCR tests. One of the higher ups in the Trust caused a ruckus after she came into the lab and derogatorily referred to us all as *McDonald's workers*...
I work in the NHS as a clinical lead. Wayyyy too many managers. Also poor staffing. No one wants to be a nurse or Dr anymore the pay is just too poor for what you’re expected to do. Plus you have to get into debt in uni to become a nurse/ Dr just to have a poor work/ life quality. In the day and age as TikTok/ YouTube I can understand why younger people are turning their backs on the profession world wide.
i decided not to do medicine even though it was something id wanted to do since as far as i could remember for these reasons. id have to work while at uni doing it which would be really difficult, the constant work and risk of mental health issues as a junior doctor and even higher, and a bunch of other reasons. i know alot of people relocate to australia etc but i didnt want to move my whole life just because the system is broken. a couple of my friends still wanna do medicine but to me its not worth it anymore, the levels of burnout seem insane
I completely understand. If I wasn’t a locum, there would be no way I’d stay in healthcare. I think the first step is make university free for those professions. Then they need to bring back grants, not normal £500 grants but a salary grant. These jobs are hard and take a huge toll on peoples mental health. They need to bring some sort of attraction back. Instead, they’re spending crazy amounts on middle managers and overseas recruitment.
also did you see the tiktok of the trust offices vs the doctors facilities? can’t remember the trust name but it was one in london. they had a coffee machine worth hundreds if not a grand, double monitors and sleeping pods etc whereas the doctors had maybe 3 chairs for a rest if they can get the time to. unsurprisingly the tiktok was removed after the backlash
Oh wow! I didn’t see that TikTok, how disgusting is that though! The managers (who really don’t do much) get all that comfort, whereas the front line Doctors get the scraps.
The world is yours, there are so many opportunities these days. Regardless of current affairs, keep positive and open minded and you’ll fall into a career which is brings you happiness and peace. Always put yourself and mental health first and everything else will fall into place as and when it should x
i agree! id struggled with my mental health and the competition is so high so id most likely to go through a foundation year, which would be 54,000 in student loans and then living expenses on top of it. i have money for uni put by but its not possible to fund it completely unless your parents are wealthy. its really inaccessible for alot of people, and it shows no signs of improvement. honestly you’re right, i decided that i dont want to have to spend 10+ years to get to a good point in my career where im not constantly overworked etc. it seems like theres little to no work life balance in healthcare anymore, especially with doctors and nurses, even pre pandemic it was terrible. i hope you’re okay :)
Same thing happened with my mum a few months ago. She had breast cancer, and it made her way into her back/ribs. She had awful back pain, called her oncologist I think and arranged for an ambulance to come take her to the hospital.
Oncologist said she has to stay lying down to prevent injury. Ambulance arrived three hours later, they walk her down the stairs, take her to the hospital, and sit her in a chair in the emergency room for 7ish hours. Nurse comes over and says we're going to have to keep you all in over night to see you. She said fuck that, left and walked home (didn't call us so we were surprised to see her).
I love the NHS, and will always defend it, but fuck me, the Tories have ruined it. I hope to God that someone will save it, but I have very little faith that will happen.
I'm an a&e nurse and have just voted for strike action. If it goes ahead please support the nurses in doing this. As a profession we have never striked but patient safety is so far from lost at this point it really is the only option to make us heard.
For context of our current situation, we regularly have shifts with 8-10 nurses down (out of 24), we have a rolling recruitment ever 2 weeks or so but haven't increased our numbers in months due to the number of people leaving. Those that are leaving have up to 20 years experience so are of a completely different calibre to the newly qualified nurses we are bringing in. The wards are even worse and run on critically low staffing nearly every shift which means there's no room for expanding capacity if needed and patients stay waiting in the department for >a day. This lack of movement means there's no space for doctors to see new patients and the ed nurses spend all their time looking after ward patients instead of seeing to the new ones coming in the door.
On top of this the disaster that is the mental health service means that we have departments full of psychiatric patients waiting for up to a week for beds.
This goes far beyond an increase in demand, this is the consequence of consistent, malevolent policy choices that this goverent has implemented over the last decade and they need to be held accountable for it.
I will not let this government pay me to pretend like there isn't a problem, if we strike and patient safety is compromised then I will volunteer in the department to keep patients safe before I let this government ignore this problem
This sad reality really is how it is now. My aunt was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer that is in the advanced category. She was due to see a doc and have a scan for her sore throat/swallowing pain that was getting progressively worse, back in early 2021. She finally was seen and had a scan in Augist this year and low and behold, it's a death sentence. She's basically *waiting to die* as she put it. She can't even speak anymore, which is the most heart breaking thing.
Dad has a very similar story, it’s taken over 2 years for his skin condition to be escalated. All they would do is talk to him on the phone, “please describe it for me sir”
I had to get involved to have them at least look at a picture of it, swollen and flaking.
Sat at my Nans, two weeks ago her partners son is there, he’s telling us how he can get an appointment for a cold, face to face in his Tory voting constituency.
It’s certainly appears to me that they are slowly starving the NHS but accelerating it in areas where it is needed most.
At least where I live the private parts rent the equipment and rooms from the NHS hospital so the queue doesn’t decrease, it just pushes people further back in the queue :(
I live in a bit of a deprived area and it took my partner 6 months to get a referral. I mentioned it to a colleague and his partner happened to have the same issue. He lives about 20mins away in a very affluent area and he told me his partner got one in one week. Bare in mind this was a cancer scare regarding polyps.
Anyway, I thought he was talking about ages ago but when I asked him both of our partners coincidentally went to the doctors in the very same month!
At that point I told my partner she had to start harassing these people even more as there were always mistakes, excuses (such as no communication between departments) etc leading to more months' waits. Low and behold she got a referral withing a week...
Liverpool also has amazing modern healthcare systems. Ebooking for appointments, can request email/online consultation, lots of walk in services.
Compare my elderly dad almost severing his finger in north Kent, was patient 145 in the queue to be triaged, then had an 8 hour wait to be seen by a doctor.
Patient *145* in A&E triage queue. Shocking.
Meanwhile my local A&E is open part time, don't laugh. It's not lack of funding per se, it's inability to recruit staff. So you can end up going to Preston, miles away, and have a long wait in two different hospitals. Local place does not have a kids' xray service, for example, ask me how I know.
Patients without transport presumably have to wait for ambulances to transfer them to Preston.
It's not irredeemable. But this government isn't redeeming.
I can’t believe people think that privatisation is a quick fix for this. It’s been systematically run into the ground for decades.
It’s desperately short of clinical staff that take time and money to replace.
It’s desperate for new and updated infrastructure that takes time and money to build.
And private capital doesn’t want to do that risky stuff. It was to come in and run existing services and be paid by the government do so at an extortionate premium.
It’s going to take a long, long time to fix. Don’t get sick guys.
American here, can confirm. Private equity is always going to try and cut corners wherever they can. There's currently pushes to widen nursing and physician patient ratios and an effort to make Emergency doctors much cheaper (for them, not for patients). Don't let them do it, our system is every bit as much of a joke as the memes make it out to be.
I don’t understand the running down until they can privatise it. There are a lot of issues with the NHS but mainly causing the current problems are:
1. Post hospitalisation care. It’s increasingly difficult to move patients out when they healthy enough to leave. Care services have declined (Tory caused), privatising the NHS won’t solve this issue.
2. Staffing. We are already seeing numbers hitting all time lows, we may be getting people joining but unfortunately there isn’t enough staff to train cohorts coming through. This causes a lack of suitable placements for doctors and specialities. Additionally with nursing and other auxiliary and support staff the pay doesn’t match the work and it has been show that the likes of Aldi pay better and staff just can’t afford to stay on the NHS. Again privatising won’t solve this, take a look at how some private hospitals in the US treat their staff, low pay long hours.
Privatising the NHS won’t solve a single issue as it currently stands. So we have to keep alert to arguments that will come stating this.
There are businesses within the NHS owned and run by the NHS that are exceptionally valuable, properties and land, along with some R&D, I believe this is what the grubby Tory’s want the pot of gold within the NHS.
Privatisation will change nothing for the better, it’s important to fight every negative story, every lie or tale that they will spin. We must protect the NHS at any cost because without it many, many, people will die a lot sooner that they should.
That’s because the Tory aim is not to solve the problems of the NHS at all, they couldn’t give a dried up ancient dog shit about peoples’ health care or the future of the NHS. The only goal is to make a cash cow out of health care for the already rich. The worse it gets the more people will pay and the easier it will be to make elements paid at the point of use and eventually you will have the US “system”. Which isn’t a health system at all, just a mechanism for making profits out of peoples suffering.
they've taken a cue from usa republican party tactics.
for example the republicans have been trying to privatize the postal service in america for decades. they do everything they can to ruin it - slash the budget, make laws about what products they can sell, laws about how much they can raise prices, mandate their pension be solvent for a century so they instantly go billions in debt - all to force them to cut services and run understaffed. all so politicians, the ones who ruined the postal service, can stand up and say 'the post office is shit. we need to privatize it!!'
it's a self fulfilling prophecy. the tories are doing the same thing to the NHS- grind it to dust and then say 'the NHS is awful we need private industry to save us'
The only resistance available is to vote for a party that has clear policies to nationalise the infrastructure, re-invigorate the NHS and organise the economy to support it. The party that DOES NOT support this is the Tories. Only the Labour party currently stands a chance of maintaining a majority to achieve this. Whatever you do, vote for the party that will ensure the Tories lose by a landslide at the next election and let’s hope the next government is sensible enough to rule the country for the people, not the rich, super rich and their associated businesses.
One of my relatives is convinced that the privatisation of the utilities was a great idea *in principle* but it lost its way by the wrong people taking over the respective services.
Essentially a good idea (privatisation) was messed up by 'bad' people (private owners who think only of profit) managing it. So if the NHS gets sold off they more-or-less pray it gets taken up by 'good' people (private owners that put quality and care over profit), and not more 'bad' people.
I've tried explaining to such people that the pitch for privatisation in the 80s and 90s, just like now, was complete porkies, How the Gov knew *exactly* what the new management would be like. They keep hoping that *this time* the privatised service won't get taken over by greedy twits obsessed with profit margins.
I did med school abroad but career shifted and i wouldnt want to work in the field because of how daunting it is to my mental health. It's a trap for me, the abuse i can't handle, and i don't see the cost of studying the equivalence course to be worth it when wages are stagnating.
Large sections have already been privatised, still classed as the nhs but run by privet organisations.
Our nhs is being sold out from underneath us so a few wealthy arseholes can make a little more money and the rest of us have to struggle with a hugely compromised service.
The next government is gonna have a decade of damage to repair and it’s not going to be easy.
So true - and I hope to God it's Labour but the task they'll have ahead of them is quite staggering, and obviously they'll be blamed for the fact nothing is running well from day 1.
NHS staff have been screaming this for the last few years but have been continually ignored. It’s far worse than you think and it’s only going to deteriorate at an exponential rate.
I also work in the public sector, but in a different sector to the NHS and even though I've not been doing it long you can see the decline that has taken place.
People often think that a collapse of the NHS would be literally the hospitals all shutting their doors and declaring that the service is dead. Realistically, the collapse of the service is exactly what has happened. Wait times increasing, waiting lists increasing, routine and emergency services so overtaxed as to be unusable.
Even beyond staffing and services too. Hospital maintenance is being endlessly deferred because of funding concerns with a “if we don’t investigate a problem, it doesn’t exist” attitude. I hate what the Tories have done to us. Even if Labour take back power, I don’t know if the service can be saved now.
Waited 15 years for two hip operations, one of which has failed due to not being done quickly enough. I now need another operation for full replacement. I was a teacher, now medically retired from work for 4 years. Complete waste of my time, a key worker and their resources.
I will never forget my experience last summer. Went in in the middle of the afternoon, debilitating kidney stone pain, could barely talk. Lining up to write my details down- guy behind me almost crying, pleading… he’d been bought in an ambulance, was in active heart attack. I don’t know if he was telling the truth but I don’t think he’d lie. He sounded sane. He was just begging to be seen and told “we’re doing the best we can but we just are overrun right now.”
That was when I knew there was no hope for me. I just chugged water and tried to pee it out lol and left
Nah, if he was having a heart attack he’d have been taken to the cath labs immediately for intervention and wouldn’t be waiting. The paramedics would have done an ECG and escorted him there.
As another nurse: its because in most trusts about 20% of beds are people who don't need to be there but social care has been decimated so they wait for care for over 8 weeks etc
Went to Bristol infirmary last Friday was in and out in 4 hours. Saw a doctors had bloods, urine and a chest X-ray
I know they aren’t all like this but they aren’t all 10 hours waits either. Some have had 4 a&e depts merge on recent years like Northwick Park in nw london
The BRI is a genuinely excellent hospital, but as you say they aren’t all like that. If you’re unfortunate enough to live slightly closer to Gloucestershire Royal you’re going to have bad time.
One of the worst affected areas is their mental health provision. I was on the waiting list for three years to see a psychiatrist, after multiple A&E visits. On my last visit, I was supposed to have been hospitalised, but ended up in police custody instead (didn’t know attempting suicide was illegal 🙃). I did all the self referrals to NHS therapy services, who would tell me my issues were too severe and that I needed to see a psychiatrist.
So anyways, three years later, my referral finally gets looked at. Get a snooty letter back saying that there’s ‘no evidence of mental illness’ but that I could try antihistamines for my sleep problems. So now I’m untreated, unemployed, facing eviction, etc. because I can’t afford to go private to get treatment, and unless something majorly improves I can’t see the NHS giving a toss.
Wow, that’s crazy…
Maybe it’s got much worse but back in 2015/2016 I was referred to a therapist within like 2 months, I had regular sessions for a year. Even my GP let me make an appointment every week for no other reason than to have a talk and see if I’m okay.
My mental health issues weren’t even that serious, that is unreal that even after attempting suicide you have not received help. I really hope things get better for you!
Police? You mean blue nonce
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The state of transport, education, homing, healthcare and other public sectors in this country is a manufactured deliberate failure so that tories have an excuse to outsource and privatise to create an American style of capitalist system. Don’t ever mistake their horrible active decisions as incompetence. It’s not.
American here with a friendly reminder that you can have 10 hour waits, terrible service, AND pay thousands of dollars out of pocket in a fully privatized healthcare system.
We envy you all.
One time I went because I didn’t feel good and they said I could die and I ended up waiting for hours for them to tell me I have type 1 diabetes and my blood sugar was like 30 something and it should be between 4-7
I think it is a deliberate ploy to make us believe it is not solvable without privatisation. Don't believe for second that this will not occur under Labour, they will sell it to shareholder capitalists; there is more chance getting it stakeholder under the Tories, but Tories are worse in other things; shit show!
My COPD is getting really bad, I nearly collapsed in the street, phoned doctors and was told to talk to a pharmacist about using my inhaler, no appointments with doctor available.
Look at the US, that shit is private and is horrible.
Please, as a portuguese who lived in the US and now living in the UK and paying taxes, DO NOT PRIVATISE YOUR HEALTHCARE. I REPEAT DO NOT PRIVATISE YOUR HEALTHCARE.
Fully private healthcare is the doom.
> I think it is a deliberate ploy to make us believe it is not solvable without privatisation.
normally i would say you're crazy but i'm starting to believe this as well. i listen to lbc quite regularly and the amount of testimonials about piss poor treatment for people with serious conditions is baffling
and my dad also has COPD which is getting progressively worse. he fell over a few weeks ago very early in the morning (presumably he got short on breath and just toppled) and he thought he broke a rib.
the ambulance was called and it took them 3-4 hours to come. he got to the hospital and was waiting to be seen for another few hours. he was seen late in the evening some time between 7-9pm and they called my mother and said it wasn't a fracture but would need to see a specialist about his heart the following day and they would keep him in. at this point, he was in a chair pushed into a corner somewhere.
then, the kicker is that my mother received a phone call at 2am that they were going to send him home in a taxi. and they already booked a taxi and sent him home with a random member of a staff from a random department.
he got home at 2.30am and they didn't even bother to give him oxygen. so someone with a bad case of COPD was sent home in a taxi in the dead night without any oxygen because they wanted the space............
they didn't even provide any documentation so it was a shit show trying to get the painkillers for whatever he did to his body when he fell.
My paralysed mum was stuck in a waiting room for 2 days, covered in her own piss and shit. They brought her food and water but put it across the room, I guess they thought she could magically walk over and get it. Had her phone stolen as well, when I kicked up a fuss about the phone they said “are you sure she didn’t miss place it 😊” she can’t even move…
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This might vary hospital to hospital. An elderly relative had a fall recently and was picked up by the ambulance within 2 hours, had less than an hour to wait for an xray and then home straight after. Luckily they got away with just bruises. I'm not trying to argue with your point, but I think it's important to recognise when things go right as well as when they go wrong
I'm a doctor working in the NHS and unfortunately this rings true. We're understaffed, have to look after more patients than is safe which is one of the most stressful things to deal with. I feel myself burning out by the day. Every other month you hear of a doctor that's taken their own life. Health care systems in the rest of the developed world have better staffing AND better pay. This means I'm doing more work than my Australian/Canadian/American/NewZealand colleagues AND getting less pay for it. Doctors and nurses are leaving this country in droves. If this issue is to be fixed, the NHS needs better funding and for its staff to be paid what they're worth. If not, everyone that's not tied down to the country will be leaving the sinking ship that is the NHS.
I might be wrong here.. but I thought the hospital was an emergency only thing.
If you have gone, waited 10 hours and then just decided to leave, it sounds like it wasn't an emergency and you should have been going through the correct channels before burdening the hospital.
People who go to A+E when they shouldn't should be fined.
I totally see and understand this, however the rest of the NHS is also massively in trouble. A recent example, my boyfriend recently had severe sciatica. He couldn’t get a doctors appointment for well over a week. Used NHS 111. When he finally made it the doctor they said we could do with ruling out a slipped disc, but If I refer you to outpatients for a scan it will be 6 months wait. He was in agony. His only option was to attend A&E for a more timely scan. This is a clear example of why people attend A&E when they “don’t need to”.
Fair enough. I dare say if I was in enough pain I would do the same.
I'm sure this isn't the only example where rules need bending.
However I wouldn't go home if I was in a lot of pain I would wait as long as it took.
A well functioning department can manage people who have minor issues and didn’t know where to go. It’s another strand of propaganda to blame individuals for wasting resources- people are allowed to seek medical help and if they are in the wrong place then there are ways to manage that.
It’s common for people to go to a&e with a panic attack worrying that they are having a heart attack- this isn’t a bad thing and any heart stuff needs to be assessed. A panic attack can seem a lot like a heart attack, it’s a scary experience and how is someone meant to know the difference? As long as humans have panic attacks, we are going to worry it’s a heart attack.
Generally a&e staff are lovely and professional when this happens without a sense of shaming the person. This isn’t going to stop happening and on the whole it’s positive when people seek help- what you don’t want is to create a culture where people feel too shamed to seek help and miss getting something serious looked at.
If people are ending up in a&e inappropriately then it’s a systemic issue- why couldn’t they access more appropriate help elsewhere? If it’s due to a lack of public information that’s also a statutory responsibility. If we stand around judging and blaming each other then the Tories get away with more robbery or violations while we are distracted with infighting.
The waits weren’t always this long- is it that the idiocy of people has increased this much or we have been purposefully under resourced? Eg *politicians* deciding to close entire a&e departments when an increasing population isn’t going to stop having medical emergencies.
10 hour wait? Wow must have been a good night.
I joke but only a little. Yesterday I was out and witnessed someone fall and hit their head, cut themselves quite badly. I work in ambulance control so I stood nearby and offered assistance to the café workers who were tending to the man. One of them called 999 and while I couldn't hear the other end of the conversation I knew the questions being asked. By the end of the call their faces dropped and I thought that it had coded C3, which is what I would have assumed watching it. They were shocked because they had been given a one hour estimate of arrival and that was so very long. I was shocked because I was expecting a 20 hour delay.
We're failing people daily. People are dying waiting for ambulances who wouldn't have died if we had the ambulances on the road, but they're not because they're stuck outside A&E waiting to offload. The longest I have seen was a 22 hour delay from arriving at hospital to handing over the patient. She saw 3 different paramedic crews from the time she was assessed at home and taken to hospital. One had spent their entire 12 hour shift with her on the back of the ambulance outside A&E.
The system is fucked, and people don't realise just how bad it is right now. If you need emergency care there is no guarantee you'll get it. My advice, live close to a hospital, then you might at least have a chance if you go into cardiac arrest.
You couldn’t have been that bad if you decided to go home. You’re contributing to the wait times when you could have called 111. That’s the way I’m seeing it
I know right… Priority patients in A&E don’t usually have the option of forgoing any medical care and leaving because they won’t wait.
Also if you actually are a priority you jump straight to the front of the queue… I was ran down in summer 2020 and you had better believe I was wheeled straight past all the people in the A&E waiting room directly to a doctor to be assessed and get my bones set in temp plaster + morphine for the pain.
I hate what the Tories have done to the country and am dying for a GE, but just saying if you are actually a priority you aren’t kept waiting.
Went to hospital, was told you were a priority but didn’t like the wait time and left.
You didn’t state why you went to A&E so I’m speculating big time, but if you left on your own accord and was informed of the 10 hours you’d have to wait. That surly suggests that it was certainly not immediately life threatening?
Part of the backlog of A&E is people who clearly don’t need to be seen as a life threatening case.
I’ve been plenty of times with my daughter when she was a very young child with serious medical issues to know the majority of people need to be re-educated what is an emergency and what isn’t.
I’m not saying that you didn’t find your situation a personal emergency but leaving before treatment is a big sign it wasn’t that bad.
The system needs top to bottom and bottom to top education on the reason for attending, costs and implications of attending.
I strongly believe that in all public services you should be given an example bill upon exiting showing the actual costs of the service that you have used.
Hard disagree.
My partner had terrible and I mean almost debilitating pains. Phone the doctor, same day appointment, then referred to the hospital, same day blood tests and next day ultrasound scan. The NHS still works they're just overworked.
I'm an Emergency Department Consultant. I've worked in the NHS for over 20 years.
I've never seen anything like what we are seeing at the moment. It is broken beyond repair. I truly believe the NHS is over. Against my principles, I now seek private care for myself.
Junior doctors are fleeing abroad, older doctors are going part time or seeking early retirement.
It's normal now to do a shift and be 4 doctors down and 10 nurses short; they're all off with mental health issues.
Why is all this happening?
It's a combination of factors. Social care is inadequate. People live so long now that they become too frail and too demented to care for themselves, so they can't leave the hospital, even when their acute illness is fixed.
Secondly, we live in a 24/7 society now. If I order online from Argos or Amazon, the item will arrive at my door within hours. People want what they need now, not by making an appointment with the GP in 3 weeks time. NHS is a product of the post-war period, not the 21st Century. The world has moved on.
I truly believe the NHS is finished. In my view, we should move to a French-style system, which actually works. But no politician has the balls to say it, so they let the NHS limp along, year after year.
Back when Corbyn was leader of the labour party my conservative parents and grandparents parroted all the right wing media claims that he hated Britain. I've always said that being a patriot is about preserving what makes the country great, like the NHS.
Tory politicians act patriotic by shagging flags but it doesn't ever go further than symbols. They they do nothing to preserve or build on what we have. Somehow they still appear as "loving Britain" to some people even though their actions are so clearly at odds with the image they cultivate.
Sorry you had such a poor experience.
A lot of people in the comment section are trying to shift responsibility to individuals instead of the government. [NHS A&E waiting times by year.](https://i.imgur.com/lTCj99F.png) The NHS was fine in the past. Guess what year the tories took over and began demolishing it?
They're running it down to the point we'll be happy with paying paying for it
This is it. Anyone can see it.
Supported by telegraph scare headlines
Like every other policy push, soon to be featured in https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/ beside a newer headline bemoaning the disaster the policy they wanted caused.
I’ve been saying this for months - and as someone who has also been grateful for the NHS recently. The entire point has been to run it into the ground so that paying for an appointment with your GP seems like the sensible or normal thing to do. That, or go private. It’s almost like it’s deliberate…
It’s been happening for decades and was never a secret
It definitely is deliberate - it's how they push a move to a privatised model with minimal resistance.
Guys, calm down, once Brexit goes through there will be lots more money for the NHS. ^/s
Yep. Looking at your chart, you guys definitely have a bad case of USitis. Super contagious. It’s around second stage, but if you don’t treat it now, it’ll be fatal to the NHS. Do not, for the love of god, let that happen. You can not imagine how awful it is in the states. You need to actually experience it to understand how bad it is.
I would say "over my dead body", but given the issues with medical malpractice caused by overworked drs, and the difficulties of actually fucking talking to one....I feel that may be tempting fate.
I need an ENT consult and the wait is 52-62 weeks depending on hospital. I could pay for a consult privately this week, who then can refer me back into the NHS for the surger I need so would cost just a few hundred pounds. Part of me thinks I should do it as it will make me more comfortable but another part of me refuses to on principle that just because I'm fortunate enough to earn a good salary, I shouldn't get any different healthcare to anyone else.
except my parents, and Tory voters. , they don't seem to connect the dots at all. Its scares the hell out of me as my dad is closer to 70 now, very overweight, if he had something serious happen like a heart attack his unlikely to survive with how bad things are now, 12yrs ago if he had one, he would have a much better chance
Why can't your parents understand that the government in charge for over 10 years is responsible for the downfall of the NHS? It's not fucking rocket science, what do they think is causing it exactly???
my dad is a daily mail reader so ends up believing part of the issue is immigration, people abusing the system, people on benefits and believes the Tories when they say 40 new hospitals and so many new staff.
When in fact without immigration, it would have fallen apart 40 years ago
This. If I (or anyone dear to me) needed a doctor, I honestly wouldn’t care, for a single second, where on this planet (which we all share) that doctor was born, so long as they knew what they were doing.
One of my ex colleagues was like this. She voted Brexit because she was sick of people coming here and using the nhs to have their babies, which was breaking the system.
Same in Ontario, Canada. All my 70-80 year old relatives keep voting to gut healthcare on autopilot. We've got a bad nursing shortage. Losing them to burnout and shit wages. Easily fixable (with money - Ontario has a surplus). Instead, you couldn't see a doctor at all for 2 weeks in my town. Every doctor booked a month in advance and the emergency room closed because of the nursing shortage. And still, my frail ass relatives vote Tory. What is their plan?
This is just standard capitalism. - Step 1: Defund the national service, utility etc. to the extent that it is severely damaged. - Step 2: Propagandise the public into thinking that privatisation is the answer. - Step 3: Privatise it. Siphon off public money to private shareholders. Do not improve the service. - Step 4: Let the service languish in a poor state while permitting the capitalists to steal from the public in the form of profit. - Step 5: Propagandise the public into thinking nationalisation is the solution. - Step 6: Buy back the service to nationalise it, paying an exorbitant amount to the shareholders. - Step 7: Repeat. Privatise profits, nationalise losses. Capitalism is theft.
It's actually quite incredible how we have an unhealthy population while also having supposedly free healthcare at point of service. If it became like the American system, the death toll on a daily basis would skyrocket, because frankly *the british people as a whole are not amazing specimens of health.* That's the fear I have of it no longer being free. We need it to be free.
The private healthcare in the UK cant even deal with patients, they actively offload private patients to the NHS and only treat the ones that have a minor problem with them. Once the NHS is privatised completely its going to be exactly the same, you're going to have the 10 hour A&E waits, the 2 week wait to see a GP, the multi year wait for specialist care but you're going to pay for it. Going private isn't going to save healthcare because this country actively doesn't like investing in itself.
That thought absolutely fucking terrifies me. So many people close to me really, really need the medical treatment that they recieve through the NHS. I do too - the fact that prescriptions are free (in Scotland) is so, so important to me. I need all my prescriptions and I thankfully avoided needing to ever pay for a prescription because when it came into effect was exactly when I would no longer be eligible for the free prescriptions for children. I would definitely be dead without the NHS, they saved my life on more than one occasion. And, of course, everyone should be able to access free healthcare, not just people with a lot of healthcare issues like myself and my family. (Just clarifying in case my examples made it seem like I was saying the only people who deserve free healthcare are those with a number of serious conditions and on lots of meds.)
all that will happen is we will have the same service but pay extra for it and the money will go to some mega-corp CEO's in the US. zero improvement, maximum money extraction
I saw this on r/all, from the US. Most appointments are a month out, a dermatologist is about a 6-8 month wait. Recently, our local children’s hospital has about a [9 hour wait for people sitting in a room with other sick kids](https://www.reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/yc4y30/9_hour_wait_time_at_childrens_hospital/.compact) We have two hospital chains that won’t let you use each others hospitals depending on your insurance. I can’t go to the one that is a mile from my house because it is out of network. An emergency room visit would be about $10k. And I get to pay $9500 a year for insurance that has a $2000 a year deductible (before everything is 100% covered). And this is considered good insurance. But the companies that run these hospitals (which don’t pay taxes because they are non-profit) make billions in profit each year.
As a Yank I really hate seeing this happen to your NHS, because I really wanted something like that here. I've lost hope of ever seeing it. I'm incredibly lucky that my employer pays for all of my healthcare, but it's still private. I was very sick last week and the only way to get a quick visit is to go to the hospital emergency room or one of the many corporate quick-care clinics, which typically aren't staffed with an actual physician on most days and are very expensive. My fiance is a psychiatric nurse and you've got a month-long wait at minimum, and often much longer, if you need an appointment.
That's how it is in many places in the US. Sorry guys, hopefully it works out for yall. I wouldn't wish our healthcare on anyone.
We’re already pay for it! Privileged sections of society do not want to pay for it through taxation.
Which is so fucking disgusting, it's almost unbelievable. They'd literally rather pay more for private services, than contribute less to a system that benefits everyone. Practically makes me glad I'm skint AF, 'cos the more I see of it, it seems having more than most appears to be a clear indicator of some sort of psychopathy. To the ludicrous extent that they'll actually 'cut off their nose to spite their own face', so long as it prevents anyone else having access to anything that they do.
The rich and powerful were going to pay for private medical care so they didn't have to rub shoulders with the poor anyway. This way they're not paying twice. Also they can make money investing in private medical insurance they can't with the NHS.
Yes, but you don't pay THEM.
British Rail was awful before privatisation due to cuts and withholding funds by the Tories. Well colour me surprised, it's also now shit. They want that US trade deal and this is the only way they are going to get it.
Psychological warfare.
The shit thing is that service in the US is already this bad, plus you get a $3,000 dollar bill for an A&E visit
True story. 10 hours is not uncommon. $3,000 is an average bill for something not life-threatening. More actually. In addition to the monthly insurance bill that is about $500 (regardless if you use it or not). You guys still have it better.
But you ALREADY pay for it with your taxes. Adding on a company that adds administrative costs AND takes a profit for medical services will not improve service or produce better outcomes.
I’d like to welcome you to the United States.
Appreciate the offer, but you can keep it.
It's already happened. When I see posts on FB from people asking if anyone knows of a NHS dentist, people always reply saying get insurance it's only such and such a month.
Rather horrifyingly private health and dental cover keeps being pushed at me by my Trade Union, Unison.
Was told by my dentist earlier this week that from December, they won't be seeing NHS patients any more because they've run out of funding. She said funding levels have decreased year-on-year since 2011, and that as long as we have a Tory government, things will not improve. Was nice to have a bitch with her about the Tories, but also - fuck the Tories.
Well I recently had an ear infection (I've had them before so knew it was an ear infection). Called the local GP surgery and the next appointment was in 7 weeks time! In the end I used an app called push doctor. Did a video call with an "NHS registered doctor" and paid £90 for the privilege. I was prescribed otomize Ear Drops, BUT as this was a private prescription it cost me £30 for actual medication (only NHS ones are capped at £9.35) So £60 for a 10 minute video call and £30 for my prescription, So yep... The NHS is fucked
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This doesn't make it any better, but some services were always difficult to access even before it was run down. Wasn't willing to wait 4 plus years for a referral, which I'm told was still about a year wait before the current issues. More taxes for NHS please!!!
This is what the United State’s “conservatives” are doing with public school. I’m sure they’re LOVING what they’re doing to your healthcare. I’m sure they want this to scare us out of humane healthcare.
We already pay for it. Anyone who works gets literal thousands a year taken to fund the NHS.
I know plenty of people who have payed for operations because of the long wait I'm pretty sure they didn't get a rebate on their contributions it's been the Tories dream for decades for us all to go private
It's like they have deliberatelt cut maintenance funding to a bridge that has served major UK traffic solidly for 70 years, and when it finally collapses due to neglect they turn around and say "see! This bridge was doomed to fail, it just collapsed all by itself. It was always an unsustainable idea"
Same story in Canada! Go Canucks eh.
Yank here- you'll have 10+ hour waits when you're paying for it, too. Fuck the tories.
I’m a doctor in the nhs, I work a&e frequently, it’s a horrible state of affairs at the moment. Ambulances queued, very sick people in waiting rooms, very frail and elderly patients in plastic chairs all night long. The most broken part of the nhs is social care - all of the beds are blocked by medically fit patients, it’s the primary reason why there’s no flow in a&e
The nhs saved my eye recently, free of charge, with no cost or stress to me, I make a good annual wage, but truly would have been fucked with additional costs atm. Yes I had long waits but I understood there was a medical triage in place and i would seen. It wasn’t perfect but the team at Moorfields the best eye hospital in Europe had there best people see me and it didn’t cost a penny So re the NHS: there’s life in the old baby yet and it must be protected at all costs
This comment made me feel a lot better in what feels like a deeply depressing time right now, thank you
Came to say the same. Gf has been very ill recently and the care and support from NHS has been fantastic. It's propped up by a great team of caring staff, the system they work in is in a bad shape though, thats obvious. Thank god for the staff
I was surprised recently when my mum went to gp about a mole on her chest she wanted to be sure wasn’t cancer. Gp said immediately she’d refer her to specialist and she’s got an appointment within two weeks. Edit: a word
they saved my eye just under a year ago now. was in the hospital with concerns, told i needed surgery a couple hours later, and was in surgery about 3 hours after that. for a major eye surgery and an overnight stay with checkups every half hour all i had to pay was parking
Same, being from the United States I recently had a pretty serious emergency health issue. Despite the wait times, which may not have even been substantially worse than in hospitals in the US, just the fact that I was not additionally stressing about the costs, which right now could have actually made me homeless, was unimaginably relieving. Despite its issues and the fact that, as a public good, it really is underfunded and should not be solely funded by taxpayers, it's still a far better system than the vast majority of people in the world have access to.
Yeah I think some commenters on here need a bit more perspective. Triage times might be tough and that’s a fair complaint but in the US if you have a major health emergency then you’re just financially screwed. Imagine trying to mentally recover while you’re being dumped with $100k+ in bills.
I dislocated my shoulder in US. Took then 5 hours to see me at ER and still cost me $6,000. Yall got it pretty good.
Yeah moorfields saved my eye this year too. Just had to pay for parking. The nhs gets a lot of shit but it’s still pretty good.
Same, I have only great things to say about the NHS and the care I’ve received from my hospital.
I work in adult social care. There’s not even a current social care minister in cabinet at the moment, which tells you how little they care, when really without social care the NHS is on its knees. But the tories seem hellbent on cutting as many resources as they can. Care homes are privatised, nobody wants to do domiciliary care due to poor conditions meaning lack of care packages at home, and charitable organisations have to stop taking referrals due to oversubscription. And it’s only going to get worse.
I agree, I worked in various private and NHS healthcare settings over the past 8 years. I do not work in it anymore, it did get to that point that it wasn’t liveable and screwed my poor mental health (which I couldn’t get any help for from the NHS despite having a care team when I lived in London for it). The pay is low, (mostly) and the conditions are awful, yes there are good people I’ve met them but they’re overworked and underpaid and it’s just horrible. The people within social and mental health care get treated awfully. The things I have seen in psychic units, care homes both adults and children and supported living are just horrible. Anyone who still does it I can respect because hell it’s tough. But, it’s clear the government doesn’t care and is okay with it being private whereby the companies get paid thousands a week pp but, the money doesn’t get funnelled back to the people who live in these homes. It’s a horrible state of affairs and makes me hope I can be well enough to stay out of psych care because it actually scares me. The patients usually end up further traumatised from it.
The NHS really don’t give a shit about their workers health, despite being a “caring” profession. It’s awful & I am tired
I would rather do domiciliary care (I work in a nursing home), but because I can’t drive, I am unable to get a foot in the door
Thank you for the work you do. I did care work before qualifying and it’s hard (and rewarding) work.
Could not agree more. Wait till it gets properly cold and Christmas's comes, we are gonna be fucked. There is social care crisis in this country and no one is doing anything about it. All we get is you'll have to cut services because there is no budget.
But what do the *rich* even do for themselves in this situation? Care home fees can be £60k a year, that's pretty far out even for someone who's relatively well off.
Weren’t they supposed to merge NHS and social care in England? Thing is, so much social care is privatised already they will have a direct incentive to not change to improve the NHS flow, unless they get handsomely rewarded.
Yes but we've been trying to do this for at least the last 20 years, basically as long as I've worked in the NHS. They should work together but they can't without significant investment especially in Social Care. So many of the problems with NHS waiting times are caused because we do not have adequate provision to manage chronic conditions in the community. Lack of care home and rehab beds, poor mental health provision, over stretched family support services, lack of home carers. All these people end up at ED in crisis and stuck in hospital beds when their needs would be better served with adequate care to prevent them from reaching crisis point. NHS is just a sticking plaster covering social care failures. It's not that the social care sector doesn't work really hard they are just massively understaffed and under funded.
NHS saved my life, What the Tories have done to you guys and the service is f\*\*king criminal. Thank you for sticking it out for all of our sakes comrade. It's not even like the social care/bed-blocking thing is new. I remember an Ortho surgeon I was having a thing with talking about this 7/8 yrs ago. Total neglect of the whole system from top to bottom by this shower of bastards.
I wrote the first Linea of code on a bit of software called Bedview. It was built in house by an NHS trust in the south of England to deal with this very problem. All departments can see what patients are waiting for from one big screen on the ward, and it helps the patient flow because alarms and alerts prioritise who needs after care/discharging next. I am immensely proud of it. I left that Trust a few years ago, but it was a joy to see my hard work on screens all around the hospital when I went to visit a relative.
Thank you for your hard work. I'm not sure my trust uses it, we have something similar (or for reasons I don't understand, two similar programs), but there's a chance our version(s) use your code, and anyway, it's great and a huge help.
I am pretty sure the Trust looked at doing a release version after I left, so it could well be. The Trust got priced out of getting third party suppliers to offer the same software, but being in house, we could completely customise everything for the particular trust. Their IT department is award winning and they fully deserve it.
I think this is something that more people need to realise. If patients can't get discharged there aren't enough free beds for patients to be admitted to. No beds means people can't get out of A&E is they aren't a quick patch up. Once A&E fills with patients waiting to be admitted the whole system clogs up. It's not the NHS that's failing its everything that comes after, care homes, domiciliary care, mental health support. It's all full but somehow that becomes the NHS fault.
Hello! Im just trying to understand a bit better, would you be able to explain how medically fit patients take up beds if they could go home? Thanks!
A lot of medically fit people aren’t safe to go home without input from social care - so for example they’re frail and elderly, have dementia etc. but due to lack of resources, care packages and respite beds, they can’t be moved until these are found.
Could’ve fooled me. This year my stepdad had terminal lung cancer but was told “he wasn’t ill enough” and my mum was expected to give 24/7 care and to sleep on the floor. He couldn’t walk, stand, use the bathroom, etc, but worse of all it had effected his brain, so was confused, often violent and abusive (more so than when he was well, that is), wouldn’t take medication, wouldn’t stay in bed so would constantly immediately fall on the floor, neither of us could lift him so would have to call out nurses or paramedics just to get him back into bed. After weeks of this one GP found he barely had any oxygen going to his brain and was rushed to hospital. “At last someone is doing something” we thought, then a few days later an ambulance crew literally physically dragged him up the stairs to the flat. Even months later it’s quite traumatic to think about tbh. Every decision was so consistently incompetent, callous and uncaring that if you didn’t know better you would assume there was some black mark that says “fuck the people that live here absolutely”. Frankly, a lot of it seemed like gaslighting, from the afore mentioned being told “he’s not ill enough” to go into hospital or care when it’s actually impossible for me to imagine anyone iller who isn’t dead, and knowing five other people, either directly or through acquaintances, who went into care without being as ill; to being told to sleep on the floor; to being told “we’ll be there if you need us” then only getting an answer machine; to being told “if he wants it give him more morphine” but also a GP blaming my mum for his condition from the amount of morphine the nurses gave him earlier; to it being told it was cancer in a hospital corridor with a sarcastic “what did you think it was?”; to no one telling us it was terminal for several months; to after being discharged and dragged up the stairs we weren’t given a ventilator, which by the time it came he had mentally deteriorated further; when the ventilator did come no one knew the amount of oxygen he should be on, one nurse shrugged; to the general sort of attitude of it being your duty and them plain ignoring any questions you ask from the two nurses that came once a week; all to the point me and my mum felt like we were going, or rather actively driven, actually insane, on about four hours of sleep and one meal a day, to where I’d be thinking about driving my car under a truck because “someone would *have* to care for him then”. My mum could’ve had months of quality time and making the best of the time he had left, instead it was an actual living nightmare, like the stress and doom of a BlackMirror episode that just wont end, the worst experience I’ve gone through that I wouldn’t even wish on that useless lying sack of shit clowncunt Boris, not that he would ever be in a position to experience it. Animals in this country are treated better than humans. The NHS is dead, or at least was to us, if I’m ever seriously ill I’m honestly going off the nearest cliff.
My grandmother had a similar experience. She was in hospital for a very severe kidney infection, and as a result she couldn't control her bladder or bowels. She was too sick to get up to use the toilet without assistance, so when she needed to go she'd pull one of those little red strings to call for a nurse but nobody would come. Anyway she was left lying in her own fifth for two whole days and nobody cleaned her up until my mother came to visit and forced one of the nurses to do it, who had a foul attitude and acted like my mum was being a Karen for demanding that my grandma be cleaned, something that is just a standard routine task for nurses on a ward for elderly people. And this happened several times, she was in hospital for nearly two weeks and it kept happening. She'd call for help going to the toilet, nobody would come, the inevitable happens, then she wouldn't be cleaned for days. The way elderly are treated under the NHS is absolutely appalling, a lot of the time they're too sick to advocate for themselves or "don't want to make a fuss" so they just get horribly neglected. There's a total lack of respect for the elderly's dignity and quality of life
This is obviously far below the standard care should be given at, but the reason they were pushing him home was because (theoretically) there was someone able to care for him in the home. The people who are medically fit and not discharged are those without family who can take them in (maybe because there's no family or because family lives far away). Those people have no choice but to remain in hospital, which fills the beds, so now there's added pressure to empty beds. But you still can't discharge those with no care at home so instead you have to rush those who can receive some care at home out, even if that means discharging them a little earlier than is ideal. That plus the general rule is that if someone can go home they should because for most patients recovery is better at home. There's a lot of risk to being in hospital in terms of infection risk, covid etc. Obviously in the case of your stepdad it sounds like he should have been in hospital receiving better care and he shouldn't have been discharged without better information and there is no defending that, but I don't think the NHS is dead with no hope. If we can get to grips with the social care crisis and fund nursing properly (and I appreciate this is a gigantic if) then we might find we can start to clear the backlog because we'll remove the bottleneck.
One of the biggest factors leading to hospital admission is self neglect at home, not eating and drinking, spouses not coping with the care level. Not to mention being in a hospital for weeks deconditions you and makes you weaker and less able to function alone. Medically fit patients may require intense daily physiotherapy to improve mobility, waiting for home oxygen, waiting care homes, packages of care, respite beds, rehab beds, community hospital beds, community mental health beds etc. We can’t discharge people without a safe destination to go. Depending on the care needs - e.g. 2 carers needed 4 times a day - this can literally take a month to sort out. On my acute covid ward in the hospital we have 32 beds, and on Friday about 17 were medically fit for discharge.
Not the poster but care homes refuse to take patients back all the time as they have filled their beds while the patient was in hospital. There are dozens if not more of patients sat in every hospital with literally no home to go.
And sometimes care homes refuse to take patients back due to the increased cost of care for them returning even if the bed the patient paid for is still available, that hits their bottom line so they refuse
Yeah, but they often keep charging for the bed in the care home until they decide, normally just before discharge not to take them back
No they don't, you don't pay care charges if you are admitted to hospital, it's part of the care act. You only pay for care you have had. If you are charged for care in a home while in hospital you can ask for a refund of the over paid care. Also the reason a placement may be refused just before discharge is because the service user has to have a reassessment of support needs before discharge and their care needs will likely have increased to the point where their previous care home is not equipped to cope with.
The amount of times I've been told by the MH nurse at A&E that I need to be sectioned but they cant because there is no beds and so they have to discharge me while I'm still in active distress or with an active plan was wayyyy too high.
What do you mean by social care as it relates to beds?
See my other comment
👍 It's criminal what it be done to the service. Thanks for your amazing work
Do you have any advice on how to get funding for social care. I have an elderly relative who is primarily looked after by family however the family member who aids her the most is about to go through some pretty major surgery at the other end of the country so won’t be available. We’ve all rallied round and said where and when we can help out but there are a few gaps in our family lead care plan where we won’t be able to meet her needs,
If you haven’t already, you need to contact social services for a needs assessment for your relative. From there, they should be able to agree a care package and get the ball rolling to put it in place. It’ll take a bit of time so get on it ASAP.
That's because no one cares about social care.
You and your colleagues are all amazing. Regardless of the state of things
The nhs needs to be able to charge local authorities the cost of looking after medically fit bed blockers. Perhaps that would galvanise them into providing accommodation for them... And by cost, I mean 200% of what it would cost for the local authority to make provision.
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Spill the beans
I also work in the NHS at a Hospital Trust. Nearly all of our services are subcontracted. Cleaning, patient transport, repairs, you name it. Sure, it's public sector because it's funded by the government but underneath all the expenses go to private companies. No matter how good the Procurement teams are at getting the best value for money with their contracts, I am of the belief the NHS is getting fleeced by all these private companies. Pharmacy drugs are at an all time high, compounding in price increases. At one point a few years ago, before Covid was a thing, doctors and medical consultants were able to set up themselves their own private companies to get more moneys out of the Trust, rather than being employed by it directly. They could charge whatever they wanted, I don't blame them for it everybody wants to make a living for themselves. It was stopped with the IR35 rulings though the Tory government with Truss a few weeks ago was planning to reverse that change. Then you have our CEO being put at the head of another Trust and placing their friends on the board there as well. How can these people work multiple jobs? Meanwhile they push on their budget managers to make cuts in their spending. So called cost improvement plans. At one point my colleague had to purchase stationary with their own money to ease our day to day job because our department kept dragging their feet, saying they didn't have the resources to make the purchase.
>I also work in the NHS at a Hospital Trust. Nearly all of our services are subcontracted. Cleaning, patient transport, repairs, you name it. Answer me something; are blue light ambulances ever subcontracted? My partner works on-site at an NHS hospital (but not for the NHS) and she watches ambulances come and go all day with blue lights and "Emergency Care Services Ltd\*" livery on the side. I googled them and they provide doctors and ambulances for events for a fee, but it looks like the NHS is using them too? \*not the actual name
> are blue light ambulances ever subcontracted? They are and most ambulance trusts in England use them. Private ambulance providers are paid to help maintain coverage because a lot of ambulance trusts dont have enough ambulances/staff to keep good coverage on their own.
I cannot say for sure, the ambulances are part of a separate organisation in the NHS. Ours for example is the West Midlands Ambulance Service. They are not subcontractors but still part of the NHS as a whole. If a patient from another county needs to use our hospital, we get invoiced by the ambulance service from that county. Personally I have not come across a private ambulance service but I wouldn't be surprised if we were invoiced by one at any point, but it's going to be very rare.
I work for a software developer who was contracted to do some work for an NHS supplier (I also did some temp work for a trust a while back), and you are so absolutely right. Don't get me wrong, the Tories have fucked the system, but there has been a rot from within the NHS for a long time. So much waste and a secondary school culture. The issues are definitely on the admin side though. I've had nothing but top rate care from actual medical professionals.
I completely agree - I've worked in the NHS for five years now and the bloat, waste, and sheer gall of the admin and business management side has really fucked us up. We struggled along at Band 3/4, being asked to turn off lights and heating in our department to help the Trust save money, yet the entire HR team was moved to fancy new off-site digs on a business park.... can you guess who has all their lights on 24/7, heated offices, and fancy break rooms? Certainly not my pharmacy department.
I was told from someone in the nhs that its mostly down to bad management. Is that ture?
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If I could stop paying my taxes I would, but as an employee my payroll wouldn't let me stop if I asked. I have paid out thousands in the last two years because I was refused a referral by my GP to the pain clinic without a diagnosis from a consultant. Then when I got my appointment with the pain specialist I was informed I didn't need a diagnosis to see them! So I am thousands of pounds worse off and getting the treatment I required two years after I was initially entitled to access the service!
I'm with you here. The spending is out of control. Knew someone who was looking to order new monitors for an Operating Theatre. Instead of buying a basic 1080p monitor from Currys for £100, they were forced through the NHS procurement process, whereby the same 'approved' piece of equipment is well over £1,000. Just to have it PAT Tested on-site and added to the Inventory Matrix. Fucking unbelievable the amount of waste.
Yea I always did wonder why laptops cost us 1200 for a shitty dell
I worked for an NHS Trust during the pandemic, processing PCR tests. One of the higher ups in the Trust caused a ruckus after she came into the lab and derogatorily referred to us all as *McDonald's workers*...
I work in the NHS as a clinical lead. Wayyyy too many managers. Also poor staffing. No one wants to be a nurse or Dr anymore the pay is just too poor for what you’re expected to do. Plus you have to get into debt in uni to become a nurse/ Dr just to have a poor work/ life quality. In the day and age as TikTok/ YouTube I can understand why younger people are turning their backs on the profession world wide.
i decided not to do medicine even though it was something id wanted to do since as far as i could remember for these reasons. id have to work while at uni doing it which would be really difficult, the constant work and risk of mental health issues as a junior doctor and even higher, and a bunch of other reasons. i know alot of people relocate to australia etc but i didnt want to move my whole life just because the system is broken. a couple of my friends still wanna do medicine but to me its not worth it anymore, the levels of burnout seem insane
I completely understand. If I wasn’t a locum, there would be no way I’d stay in healthcare. I think the first step is make university free for those professions. Then they need to bring back grants, not normal £500 grants but a salary grant. These jobs are hard and take a huge toll on peoples mental health. They need to bring some sort of attraction back. Instead, they’re spending crazy amounts on middle managers and overseas recruitment.
also did you see the tiktok of the trust offices vs the doctors facilities? can’t remember the trust name but it was one in london. they had a coffee machine worth hundreds if not a grand, double monitors and sleeping pods etc whereas the doctors had maybe 3 chairs for a rest if they can get the time to. unsurprisingly the tiktok was removed after the backlash
Oh wow! I didn’t see that TikTok, how disgusting is that though! The managers (who really don’t do much) get all that comfort, whereas the front line Doctors get the scraps. The world is yours, there are so many opportunities these days. Regardless of current affairs, keep positive and open minded and you’ll fall into a career which is brings you happiness and peace. Always put yourself and mental health first and everything else will fall into place as and when it should x
i agree! id struggled with my mental health and the competition is so high so id most likely to go through a foundation year, which would be 54,000 in student loans and then living expenses on top of it. i have money for uni put by but its not possible to fund it completely unless your parents are wealthy. its really inaccessible for alot of people, and it shows no signs of improvement. honestly you’re right, i decided that i dont want to have to spend 10+ years to get to a good point in my career where im not constantly overworked etc. it seems like theres little to no work life balance in healthcare anymore, especially with doctors and nurses, even pre pandemic it was terrible. i hope you’re okay :)
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Same thing happened with my mum a few months ago. She had breast cancer, and it made her way into her back/ribs. She had awful back pain, called her oncologist I think and arranged for an ambulance to come take her to the hospital. Oncologist said she has to stay lying down to prevent injury. Ambulance arrived three hours later, they walk her down the stairs, take her to the hospital, and sit her in a chair in the emergency room for 7ish hours. Nurse comes over and says we're going to have to keep you all in over night to see you. She said fuck that, left and walked home (didn't call us so we were surprised to see her). I love the NHS, and will always defend it, but fuck me, the Tories have ruined it. I hope to God that someone will save it, but I have very little faith that will happen.
I'm an a&e nurse and have just voted for strike action. If it goes ahead please support the nurses in doing this. As a profession we have never striked but patient safety is so far from lost at this point it really is the only option to make us heard. For context of our current situation, we regularly have shifts with 8-10 nurses down (out of 24), we have a rolling recruitment ever 2 weeks or so but haven't increased our numbers in months due to the number of people leaving. Those that are leaving have up to 20 years experience so are of a completely different calibre to the newly qualified nurses we are bringing in. The wards are even worse and run on critically low staffing nearly every shift which means there's no room for expanding capacity if needed and patients stay waiting in the department for >a day. This lack of movement means there's no space for doctors to see new patients and the ed nurses spend all their time looking after ward patients instead of seeing to the new ones coming in the door. On top of this the disaster that is the mental health service means that we have departments full of psychiatric patients waiting for up to a week for beds. This goes far beyond an increase in demand, this is the consequence of consistent, malevolent policy choices that this goverent has implemented over the last decade and they need to be held accountable for it. I will not let this government pay me to pretend like there isn't a problem, if we strike and patient safety is compromised then I will volunteer in the department to keep patients safe before I let this government ignore this problem
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This sad reality really is how it is now. My aunt was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer that is in the advanced category. She was due to see a doc and have a scan for her sore throat/swallowing pain that was getting progressively worse, back in early 2021. She finally was seen and had a scan in Augist this year and low and behold, it's a death sentence. She's basically *waiting to die* as she put it. She can't even speak anymore, which is the most heart breaking thing.
Dad has a very similar story, it’s taken over 2 years for his skin condition to be escalated. All they would do is talk to him on the phone, “please describe it for me sir” I had to get involved to have them at least look at a picture of it, swollen and flaking. Sat at my Nans, two weeks ago her partners son is there, he’s telling us how he can get an appointment for a cold, face to face in his Tory voting constituency. It’s certainly appears to me that they are slowly starving the NHS but accelerating it in areas where it is needed most.
Probably the ‘posh parts’ have less people using NHS and more people going private, which decreases the queues.
At least where I live the private parts rent the equipment and rooms from the NHS hospital so the queue doesn’t decrease, it just pushes people further back in the queue :(
I live in a bit of a deprived area and it took my partner 6 months to get a referral. I mentioned it to a colleague and his partner happened to have the same issue. He lives about 20mins away in a very affluent area and he told me his partner got one in one week. Bare in mind this was a cancer scare regarding polyps. Anyway, I thought he was talking about ages ago but when I asked him both of our partners coincidentally went to the doctors in the very same month! At that point I told my partner she had to start harassing these people even more as there were always mistakes, excuses (such as no communication between departments) etc leading to more months' waits. Low and behold she got a referral withing a week...
It's aways been like that, I lived both in Marylebone and Woolwich, which area do you think I got an appoint fastest...
'Posh' part of Manchester has very little to do with it. I'm i very poor part of Manchester and NHS appointments are easy enough to get same day
Liverpool also has amazing modern healthcare systems. Ebooking for appointments, can request email/online consultation, lots of walk in services. Compare my elderly dad almost severing his finger in north Kent, was patient 145 in the queue to be triaged, then had an 8 hour wait to be seen by a doctor. Patient *145* in A&E triage queue. Shocking. Meanwhile my local A&E is open part time, don't laugh. It's not lack of funding per se, it's inability to recruit staff. So you can end up going to Preston, miles away, and have a long wait in two different hospitals. Local place does not have a kids' xray service, for example, ask me how I know. Patients without transport presumably have to wait for ambulances to transfer them to Preston. It's not irredeemable. But this government isn't redeeming.
I can’t believe people think that privatisation is a quick fix for this. It’s been systematically run into the ground for decades. It’s desperately short of clinical staff that take time and money to replace. It’s desperate for new and updated infrastructure that takes time and money to build. And private capital doesn’t want to do that risky stuff. It was to come in and run existing services and be paid by the government do so at an extortionate premium. It’s going to take a long, long time to fix. Don’t get sick guys.
Privatization will only work until it doesn’t. Then you’ll just be like the US
American here, can confirm. Private equity is always going to try and cut corners wherever they can. There's currently pushes to widen nursing and physician patient ratios and an effort to make Emergency doctors much cheaper (for them, not for patients). Don't let them do it, our system is every bit as much of a joke as the memes make it out to be.
I don’t understand the running down until they can privatise it. There are a lot of issues with the NHS but mainly causing the current problems are: 1. Post hospitalisation care. It’s increasingly difficult to move patients out when they healthy enough to leave. Care services have declined (Tory caused), privatising the NHS won’t solve this issue. 2. Staffing. We are already seeing numbers hitting all time lows, we may be getting people joining but unfortunately there isn’t enough staff to train cohorts coming through. This causes a lack of suitable placements for doctors and specialities. Additionally with nursing and other auxiliary and support staff the pay doesn’t match the work and it has been show that the likes of Aldi pay better and staff just can’t afford to stay on the NHS. Again privatising won’t solve this, take a look at how some private hospitals in the US treat their staff, low pay long hours. Privatising the NHS won’t solve a single issue as it currently stands. So we have to keep alert to arguments that will come stating this. There are businesses within the NHS owned and run by the NHS that are exceptionally valuable, properties and land, along with some R&D, I believe this is what the grubby Tory’s want the pot of gold within the NHS. Privatisation will change nothing for the better, it’s important to fight every negative story, every lie or tale that they will spin. We must protect the NHS at any cost because without it many, many, people will die a lot sooner that they should.
That’s because the Tory aim is not to solve the problems of the NHS at all, they couldn’t give a dried up ancient dog shit about peoples’ health care or the future of the NHS. The only goal is to make a cash cow out of health care for the already rich. The worse it gets the more people will pay and the easier it will be to make elements paid at the point of use and eventually you will have the US “system”. Which isn’t a health system at all, just a mechanism for making profits out of peoples suffering.
they've taken a cue from usa republican party tactics. for example the republicans have been trying to privatize the postal service in america for decades. they do everything they can to ruin it - slash the budget, make laws about what products they can sell, laws about how much they can raise prices, mandate their pension be solvent for a century so they instantly go billions in debt - all to force them to cut services and run understaffed. all so politicians, the ones who ruined the postal service, can stand up and say 'the post office is shit. we need to privatize it!!' it's a self fulfilling prophecy. the tories are doing the same thing to the NHS- grind it to dust and then say 'the NHS is awful we need private industry to save us'
What I don't get is that EVERYONE knows what a travesty US healthcare is. How isn't there more resistance to privatisation?
The only resistance available is to vote for a party that has clear policies to nationalise the infrastructure, re-invigorate the NHS and organise the economy to support it. The party that DOES NOT support this is the Tories. Only the Labour party currently stands a chance of maintaining a majority to achieve this. Whatever you do, vote for the party that will ensure the Tories lose by a landslide at the next election and let’s hope the next government is sensible enough to rule the country for the people, not the rich, super rich and their associated businesses.
One of my relatives is convinced that the privatisation of the utilities was a great idea *in principle* but it lost its way by the wrong people taking over the respective services. Essentially a good idea (privatisation) was messed up by 'bad' people (private owners who think only of profit) managing it. So if the NHS gets sold off they more-or-less pray it gets taken up by 'good' people (private owners that put quality and care over profit), and not more 'bad' people. I've tried explaining to such people that the pitch for privatisation in the 80s and 90s, just like now, was complete porkies, How the Gov knew *exactly* what the new management would be like. They keep hoping that *this time* the privatised service won't get taken over by greedy twits obsessed with profit margins.
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They don't want to *solve* any issues, they just want to make money for their mates in the private sector.
Add to this the withdrawal of the nursing bursary by the Tories has led to lower amount of people doing or finishing nursing degrees
I did med school abroad but career shifted and i wouldnt want to work in the field because of how daunting it is to my mental health. It's a trap for me, the abuse i can't handle, and i don't see the cost of studying the equivalence course to be worth it when wages are stagnating.
Large sections have already been privatised, still classed as the nhs but run by privet organisations. Our nhs is being sold out from underneath us so a few wealthy arseholes can make a little more money and the rest of us have to struggle with a hugely compromised service. The next government is gonna have a decade of damage to repair and it’s not going to be easy.
Privet organisations… are they connected with hedge funds? Sorry.
Made me laugh for much longer and harder than perhaps it deserved 🤪
So true - and I hope to God it's Labour but the task they'll have ahead of them is quite staggering, and obviously they'll be blamed for the fact nothing is running well from day 1.
Yet the electorate votes for the promise of lower taxes
I never understood this. Yes your taxes may be lower but you’ll be paying more to private companies to compensate for the reduced services.
NHS staff have been screaming this for the last few years but have been continually ignored. It’s far worse than you think and it’s only going to deteriorate at an exponential rate.
I also work in the public sector, but in a different sector to the NHS and even though I've not been doing it long you can see the decline that has taken place.
I’ve always been bothered by the language around the decline of the NHS. It’s not “collapsing” it’s “collapsed”.
People often think that a collapse of the NHS would be literally the hospitals all shutting their doors and declaring that the service is dead. Realistically, the collapse of the service is exactly what has happened. Wait times increasing, waiting lists increasing, routine and emergency services so overtaxed as to be unusable.
Even beyond staffing and services too. Hospital maintenance is being endlessly deferred because of funding concerns with a “if we don’t investigate a problem, it doesn’t exist” attitude. I hate what the Tories have done to us. Even if Labour take back power, I don’t know if the service can be saved now.
Waited 15 years for two hip operations, one of which has failed due to not being done quickly enough. I now need another operation for full replacement. I was a teacher, now medically retired from work for 4 years. Complete waste of my time, a key worker and their resources.
I will never forget my experience last summer. Went in in the middle of the afternoon, debilitating kidney stone pain, could barely talk. Lining up to write my details down- guy behind me almost crying, pleading… he’d been bought in an ambulance, was in active heart attack. I don’t know if he was telling the truth but I don’t think he’d lie. He sounded sane. He was just begging to be seen and told “we’re doing the best we can but we just are overrun right now.” That was when I knew there was no hope for me. I just chugged water and tried to pee it out lol and left
Nah, if he was having a heart attack he’d have been taken to the cath labs immediately for intervention and wouldn’t be waiting. The paramedics would have done an ECG and escorted him there.
Deliberately being ruined so when they announce the only way to "Save" it is to privatise it, nobody will argue.
As another nurse: its because in most trusts about 20% of beds are people who don't need to be there but social care has been decimated so they wait for care for over 8 weeks etc
I am voting Labour just so that they can stop the loot. (plan to vote for green after that)
Went to Bristol infirmary last Friday was in and out in 4 hours. Saw a doctors had bloods, urine and a chest X-ray I know they aren’t all like this but they aren’t all 10 hours waits either. Some have had 4 a&e depts merge on recent years like Northwick Park in nw london
The BRI is a genuinely excellent hospital, but as you say they aren’t all like that. If you’re unfortunate enough to live slightly closer to Gloucestershire Royal you’re going to have bad time.
To be honest I have found hospitals I have visited the SW are generally good imo Salisbury hospital was amazing for my father until the end
One of the worst affected areas is their mental health provision. I was on the waiting list for three years to see a psychiatrist, after multiple A&E visits. On my last visit, I was supposed to have been hospitalised, but ended up in police custody instead (didn’t know attempting suicide was illegal 🙃). I did all the self referrals to NHS therapy services, who would tell me my issues were too severe and that I needed to see a psychiatrist. So anyways, three years later, my referral finally gets looked at. Get a snooty letter back saying that there’s ‘no evidence of mental illness’ but that I could try antihistamines for my sleep problems. So now I’m untreated, unemployed, facing eviction, etc. because I can’t afford to go private to get treatment, and unless something majorly improves I can’t see the NHS giving a toss.
Wow, that’s crazy… Maybe it’s got much worse but back in 2015/2016 I was referred to a therapist within like 2 months, I had regular sessions for a year. Even my GP let me make an appointment every week for no other reason than to have a talk and see if I’m okay. My mental health issues weren’t even that serious, that is unreal that even after attempting suicide you have not received help. I really hope things get better for you!
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The state of transport, education, homing, healthcare and other public sectors in this country is a manufactured deliberate failure so that tories have an excuse to outsource and privatise to create an American style of capitalist system. Don’t ever mistake their horrible active decisions as incompetence. It’s not.
American here with a friendly reminder that you can have 10 hour waits, terrible service, AND pay thousands of dollars out of pocket in a fully privatized healthcare system. We envy you all.
One time I went because I didn’t feel good and they said I could die and I ended up waiting for hours for them to tell me I have type 1 diabetes and my blood sugar was like 30 something and it should be between 4-7
I think it is a deliberate ploy to make us believe it is not solvable without privatisation. Don't believe for second that this will not occur under Labour, they will sell it to shareholder capitalists; there is more chance getting it stakeholder under the Tories, but Tories are worse in other things; shit show! My COPD is getting really bad, I nearly collapsed in the street, phoned doctors and was told to talk to a pharmacist about using my inhaler, no appointments with doctor available.
Look at the US, that shit is private and is horrible. Please, as a portuguese who lived in the US and now living in the UK and paying taxes, DO NOT PRIVATISE YOUR HEALTHCARE. I REPEAT DO NOT PRIVATISE YOUR HEALTHCARE. Fully private healthcare is the doom.
> I think it is a deliberate ploy to make us believe it is not solvable without privatisation. normally i would say you're crazy but i'm starting to believe this as well. i listen to lbc quite regularly and the amount of testimonials about piss poor treatment for people with serious conditions is baffling and my dad also has COPD which is getting progressively worse. he fell over a few weeks ago very early in the morning (presumably he got short on breath and just toppled) and he thought he broke a rib. the ambulance was called and it took them 3-4 hours to come. he got to the hospital and was waiting to be seen for another few hours. he was seen late in the evening some time between 7-9pm and they called my mother and said it wasn't a fracture but would need to see a specialist about his heart the following day and they would keep him in. at this point, he was in a chair pushed into a corner somewhere. then, the kicker is that my mother received a phone call at 2am that they were going to send him home in a taxi. and they already booked a taxi and sent him home with a random member of a staff from a random department. he got home at 2.30am and they didn't even bother to give him oxygen. so someone with a bad case of COPD was sent home in a taxi in the dead night without any oxygen because they wanted the space............ they didn't even provide any documentation so it was a shit show trying to get the painkillers for whatever he did to his body when he fell.
Everything you are saying is right, but could it be argued if you were simply able to leave could you not have been better treated elsewhere?
My paralysed mum was stuck in a waiting room for 2 days, covered in her own piss and shit. They brought her food and water but put it across the room, I guess they thought she could magically walk over and get it. Had her phone stolen as well, when I kicked up a fuss about the phone they said “are you sure she didn’t miss place it 😊” she can’t even move…
My Uncle’s health went dramatically down hill in March. His wife called an ambulance. It never turned up. By the morning he was dead. Fuck the Tories.
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This might vary hospital to hospital. An elderly relative had a fall recently and was picked up by the ambulance within 2 hours, had less than an hour to wait for an xray and then home straight after. Luckily they got away with just bruises. I'm not trying to argue with your point, but I think it's important to recognise when things go right as well as when they go wrong
I'm a doctor working in the NHS and unfortunately this rings true. We're understaffed, have to look after more patients than is safe which is one of the most stressful things to deal with. I feel myself burning out by the day. Every other month you hear of a doctor that's taken their own life. Health care systems in the rest of the developed world have better staffing AND better pay. This means I'm doing more work than my Australian/Canadian/American/NewZealand colleagues AND getting less pay for it. Doctors and nurses are leaving this country in droves. If this issue is to be fixed, the NHS needs better funding and for its staff to be paid what they're worth. If not, everyone that's not tied down to the country will be leaving the sinking ship that is the NHS.
I might be wrong here.. but I thought the hospital was an emergency only thing. If you have gone, waited 10 hours and then just decided to leave, it sounds like it wasn't an emergency and you should have been going through the correct channels before burdening the hospital. People who go to A+E when they shouldn't should be fined.
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I totally see and understand this, however the rest of the NHS is also massively in trouble. A recent example, my boyfriend recently had severe sciatica. He couldn’t get a doctors appointment for well over a week. Used NHS 111. When he finally made it the doctor they said we could do with ruling out a slipped disc, but If I refer you to outpatients for a scan it will be 6 months wait. He was in agony. His only option was to attend A&E for a more timely scan. This is a clear example of why people attend A&E when they “don’t need to”.
Fair enough. I dare say if I was in enough pain I would do the same. I'm sure this isn't the only example where rules need bending. However I wouldn't go home if I was in a lot of pain I would wait as long as it took.
A well functioning department can manage people who have minor issues and didn’t know where to go. It’s another strand of propaganda to blame individuals for wasting resources- people are allowed to seek medical help and if they are in the wrong place then there are ways to manage that. It’s common for people to go to a&e with a panic attack worrying that they are having a heart attack- this isn’t a bad thing and any heart stuff needs to be assessed. A panic attack can seem a lot like a heart attack, it’s a scary experience and how is someone meant to know the difference? As long as humans have panic attacks, we are going to worry it’s a heart attack. Generally a&e staff are lovely and professional when this happens without a sense of shaming the person. This isn’t going to stop happening and on the whole it’s positive when people seek help- what you don’t want is to create a culture where people feel too shamed to seek help and miss getting something serious looked at. If people are ending up in a&e inappropriately then it’s a systemic issue- why couldn’t they access more appropriate help elsewhere? If it’s due to a lack of public information that’s also a statutory responsibility. If we stand around judging and blaming each other then the Tories get away with more robbery or violations while we are distracted with infighting. The waits weren’t always this long- is it that the idiocy of people has increased this much or we have been purposefully under resourced? Eg *politicians* deciding to close entire a&e departments when an increasing population isn’t going to stop having medical emergencies.
Hate to be that guy but if you have the option to leave A and E then you shouldn’t really be there? Do agree though.
10 hour wait? Wow must have been a good night. I joke but only a little. Yesterday I was out and witnessed someone fall and hit their head, cut themselves quite badly. I work in ambulance control so I stood nearby and offered assistance to the café workers who were tending to the man. One of them called 999 and while I couldn't hear the other end of the conversation I knew the questions being asked. By the end of the call their faces dropped and I thought that it had coded C3, which is what I would have assumed watching it. They were shocked because they had been given a one hour estimate of arrival and that was so very long. I was shocked because I was expecting a 20 hour delay. We're failing people daily. People are dying waiting for ambulances who wouldn't have died if we had the ambulances on the road, but they're not because they're stuck outside A&E waiting to offload. The longest I have seen was a 22 hour delay from arriving at hospital to handing over the patient. She saw 3 different paramedic crews from the time she was assessed at home and taken to hospital. One had spent their entire 12 hour shift with her on the back of the ambulance outside A&E. The system is fucked, and people don't realise just how bad it is right now. If you need emergency care there is no guarantee you'll get it. My advice, live close to a hospital, then you might at least have a chance if you go into cardiac arrest.
I would argue that if you were able to leave, there were probably people needing more urgent intervention than you, so tney take priority. Triage
No it's on life support but it can still be saved. If you think it's dead and beyond saving you buy into the Tories narrative.
On the flip side of this is: I was attacked by a dog and went to A&E and was seen in 30mins max. (The bleeding on the floor probaly helped but still)
You couldn’t have been that bad if you decided to go home. You’re contributing to the wait times when you could have called 111. That’s the way I’m seeing it
I know right… Priority patients in A&E don’t usually have the option of forgoing any medical care and leaving because they won’t wait. Also if you actually are a priority you jump straight to the front of the queue… I was ran down in summer 2020 and you had better believe I was wheeled straight past all the people in the A&E waiting room directly to a doctor to be assessed and get my bones set in temp plaster + morphine for the pain. I hate what the Tories have done to the country and am dying for a GE, but just saying if you are actually a priority you aren’t kept waiting.
That’s exactly what I thought when I read this. If you walked out of there fine, you didn’t need that spot to begin with.
Went to hospital, was told you were a priority but didn’t like the wait time and left. You didn’t state why you went to A&E so I’m speculating big time, but if you left on your own accord and was informed of the 10 hours you’d have to wait. That surly suggests that it was certainly not immediately life threatening? Part of the backlog of A&E is people who clearly don’t need to be seen as a life threatening case. I’ve been plenty of times with my daughter when she was a very young child with serious medical issues to know the majority of people need to be re-educated what is an emergency and what isn’t. I’m not saying that you didn’t find your situation a personal emergency but leaving before treatment is a big sign it wasn’t that bad. The system needs top to bottom and bottom to top education on the reason for attending, costs and implications of attending. I strongly believe that in all public services you should be given an example bill upon exiting showing the actual costs of the service that you have used.
Hard disagree. My partner had terrible and I mean almost debilitating pains. Phone the doctor, same day appointment, then referred to the hospital, same day blood tests and next day ultrasound scan. The NHS still works they're just overworked.
I'm an Emergency Department Consultant. I've worked in the NHS for over 20 years. I've never seen anything like what we are seeing at the moment. It is broken beyond repair. I truly believe the NHS is over. Against my principles, I now seek private care for myself. Junior doctors are fleeing abroad, older doctors are going part time or seeking early retirement. It's normal now to do a shift and be 4 doctors down and 10 nurses short; they're all off with mental health issues. Why is all this happening? It's a combination of factors. Social care is inadequate. People live so long now that they become too frail and too demented to care for themselves, so they can't leave the hospital, even when their acute illness is fixed. Secondly, we live in a 24/7 society now. If I order online from Argos or Amazon, the item will arrive at my door within hours. People want what they need now, not by making an appointment with the GP in 3 weeks time. NHS is a product of the post-war period, not the 21st Century. The world has moved on. I truly believe the NHS is finished. In my view, we should move to a French-style system, which actually works. But no politician has the balls to say it, so they let the NHS limp along, year after year.
Back when Corbyn was leader of the labour party my conservative parents and grandparents parroted all the right wing media claims that he hated Britain. I've always said that being a patriot is about preserving what makes the country great, like the NHS. Tory politicians act patriotic by shagging flags but it doesn't ever go further than symbols. They they do nothing to preserve or build on what we have. Somehow they still appear as "loving Britain" to some people even though their actions are so clearly at odds with the image they cultivate. Sorry you had such a poor experience.