The NHS...is it that bad ?

[alittlebitfrench]

I keep reading horror stories about the NHS. Is it really that bad ? Is healthcare in the UK third world as doctors/people describe ?

Are people waiting on ambulances for 4 hours before being admitted to hospital ? Are people dying in corridors because they are not being seen by a doctor ?

I have not been to a doctors/hospital in the UK since the 1990's so I really have no idea what is going on but it does look worrying from what I read..

[woolybanana]

At present the NHS is being overwhelmed by a flu epidemic that it could not really have predicted nor planned for. I suspect that AnE. Is taking the brunt of this but there is a wave effect into the rest of the system.

Apart from this, my indirect experience is that the NHS is excellent, though that may not be true in all parts of the country.

[Mac]

I agree. Living over here I don't use the NHS -but speaking to my sister there don't appear to be huge problems in general when she needs to take my parents for check-ups, to the GP or for tests.

[Hoddy]

You can check on any area here -

www.bbc.co.uk/nhstracker

[DraytonBoy]

The actual care you receive is world class, however WHEN you receive it is the current problem with a lack of beds and staff pretty much everywhere in the country. I'm not sure that Mrs May actually believes there's a funding/staff shortage within the NHS despite the daily horror stories of patients being treated on stretchers in corridors etc.

[lindal1000]

One of my friends in UK was unfortunate enough to need emergency care over the new year. Nearest hospital was full and couldn't take any more in A&E, so he was driven 40 miles to the main hospital in the nearest city. An hour in the ambulance and then when he was eventually seen in the department the cubicle was still covered in blood from the previous patient. They described it as like a 'war zone', They said the medical treatment was good when they eventually saw someone, but all the staff were completely exhausted and run off their feet. On top of the winter pressures there are also difficulties recruiting staff, and cut backs in social care, that mean that there are delays in discharging patients that need home support,

[Patf]

It partly depends where you live.

My Mum had a stroke in 1997, and was waiting on a stretcher in a corridor for a bed for about 3 hours.

We were with her most of the time.

In another part of the country, a few years later, the mother of a friend had a stroke, emergency team arrived a few minutes later, straight in for special treatment which avoided serious brain damage.

[rock]

Short answer is yes, though it is easing there were patients being treated on floors as they had run out of trolleys. Monday treatment was going on in car parks. My local hospital has an occupancy of 104% and this after the rush. Ambulances, six indeed parked waiting with patients for 4 hours or more.

Not to mention all non essential operations cancelled last week which is continuing.

The dedication of nursing staff is remarkable.

Local doctors? One of my family has been called earlier today by their local practice to be told they have an infecction following tests and they should go to the surgery asap. On arrival at the surgery they have been told all the doctors are in a meeting / training but the duty doctor will phone sometime this evening.

In normal circumstances unless it is an emergency an apointment is booked a week to ten days.

[idun]

And I was waiting on a trolley in a drafty corridor, the first door after the main Les urgences door and had diarrhea on this bed, in spite of telling the nurse I needed the toilet, and she shouted at me when she eventually came back. Over 12 hours in that corridor...in France!

Les urgences were always slow for us with our casse cou children, 6 or more hours the norm.

How is the NHS? some things are a bit odd and I find slow, and others great. Mismanaged that is for sure.

Trouble is all the rent they pay in most of the modern hospitals, and good friends who are specialists at a major hospital have explained all to me. I have no idea how this can be sorted as money is going to private business but in general the actual buildings are being maintained properly at the cost of having insufficient budget left for staffing the places properly. And from what I can gather when the government doshes out more money, the landlords want MORE!!!!!

Love to see my local hospital full budget and accounts. Top dogs certainly over paid too!

French news showed the 'war zone' NHS one evening and a very similar scenario in a french hospital a day or so later.

[BritinBretagne]

It will be fine after March 2019 when the £350,000,000 a day starts rolling in.

[BritinBretagne]

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572116

[andyh4]

Wooly wrote

At present the NHS is being overwhelmed by a flu epidemic that it could not really have predicted nor planned for.

Utter tosh Wooly. They failed to predict the flu epidemic last year, and the year before. Using something that happens every year as an excuse that "could not be predicted" is a bit like the power companies not having enough generating capacity because they did not predict lower winter temperatures.

[suein56]

Idun wrote : And I was waiting on a trolley in a drafty corridor ... Over 12 hours in that corridor...in France!

Les urgences were always slow for us with our casse cou children, 6 or more hours the norm.

Our experiences of urgences here are like yours. The only exception was last May when my OH had a haemorrhage around 5am; the ambulance ie the pompiers took ages to arrive and when OH arrived in Hospital he was seen quite quickly ie after around 1 hour. Diagnosis took longer as they weren't too sure about where the blood had come from as he had an open wound on his forehead from hitting the tiled floor when he collapsed. I made a few suggestions and described the huge puddle on the bathroom floor and eventually tests were arranged. These took all day as there was such a backlog. Later it was that decided he needed to be admitted .. but he was supposed to be sleeping in a 'box' as there were no available gastro beds but one was finally found around 9pm that night. In other words someone was booted out to make way for my OH. This was quick treatment by current standards hereabouts.

My friend, who fractured her ankle, was eventually seen after 12 hours and treated after 27 hours .. but then she chose early December to have her fall (at home). Even though we rarely have snow or ice here as we are by the sea so Urgences was not full of 60+ year olds who had fallen over on the ice.

We are possibly worse than some equivalent areas in the UK .. but there you go.

[woolybanana]

Stop bedblocking, plus the drunks in A n E, plus clean up the vast waste in procurement might sort most of it. Just about a billion pounds which would go a long way.

No system can cope with undefinable open ended situations, keep wards empty just in case, nurses on call just in case ......agency staff are the necessary compromise and a bad one at that.

For a start.

[YCCMB]

I've had few issues locally in my area. Last time I called the surgery for an appointment early one morning, the first one I was offered I had to turn down as I was still in my dressing gown and the appointment was so soon after my call that I wouldn't have had time to dress and get there in time.

On my last visit to the surgery, however, I had to see the nurse to get blood taken for some tests and had to wait a fair time as the queue of elderly folk waiting to get their flu jabs was almost out of the door. No offence intended to the elderly or flu jabs but I wish they'd sort out some kind of system that stopped this annual event, more predictable than any epidemic, from clogging up the appointments system for people with other needs.

The NHS does need more money. As JC ( not the real messiah, but gunning for his job) said only today on the news..if the govt pumps zillions into the health service tomorrow it won't change things for a while as they wont be able to spend it and fix things by the next day. The money should have been pumped in many moons ago for its effects to be seen by now. Possible even by the last Labour govt, never mind the subsequent Tory ones.

Recently a friend in France had to drive her OH herself, by car, over an hour to Bordeaux with half his hand literally hanging off (he'd circular-sawed it) because our local hospital said they had nobody competent to do it and "you can wait for an ambulance but it might be a while"... Once in Bordeaux, the care he has received has been exemplary and his hand has been expertly saved, but can I imagine a situation in the UK where someone would be told in such a clear emergency to drive the sick person over an hour away by themselves? Nope.

And bed blocking? Wooly, you have hit the nail. My b-I-l was stuck in hospital recently for the best part of six weeks waiting for Social services to get their act together to put a care plan in place for him. He was physically fit to leave hospital but could not be allowed home until they'd sorted it. Six weeks. Absurd.

[woolybanana]

Thank you Betty.

I forgot to mention hospitals paying business rates and excessive rents. Money for patients wasted.

[lindal1000]

The problem is social care budgets have been cut and social care also suffers from difficulty in recruiting appropriate staff. It's a tough job, on the minimum wage, for which you really need a vocation. It's one area that depends on a flexible workforce and one that depends on immigrant labour. Add into that, increases in retirement age for women, which means that a whole generation of women who, in the past may have supported elderly residents in the early years of their retirement who now have to continue working. My cousin in particular would have loved to retire so she could help care for her mother who has Alzheimer's but she can't.

The reason for the delays is because it just takes time to assess what care someone needs and then find someone willing and able to provide it and sort out who pays. The more complex the care needed the longer it takes. Add in that over Christmas and the New year many staff are on holiday and whilst they may be able to cope with existing work loads they can't suddenly pick up new cases.

[YCCMB]

Lindal, this happened well before Christmas. And Mr Betty has given me a litany of examples of, if not incompetence, at least a lack of joined-up thinking and organisation on the part of the team supposedly overseeing my b-I-l's care.

On one occasion, Mr Betty cancelled a meeting with the team by telephone because my s-I-l couldn't attend due to the death of another family member: she had to attend the funeral in Holland. The message was clearly transmitted and acknowledged. Imagine his surprise, then, at the time of the cancelled meeting, when he received a phone call from the very person he'd spoken to about cancelling, to say "we're all here waiting: where are you?"

On more than one occasion, they've promised to contact Mr B with updates and never called. The suggestion to do so came from them, not him.

Meanwhile, my b-I-l, in the early stages of vascular dementia and Alzheimer's, was left bewildered, upset and very disturbed as to why he couldn't return home.

[lindal1000]

Those things are nothing new though, I'm not justifying them but I remember trying to get everyone together to work out a solution was a very difficult job. It's okay until you get an emergency case to deal with and then everything else gets forgotten. And even if it had all gone smoothly 6 weeks sounds about right for organising a care package for someone with dementia. There is often a waiting list for care staff.. especially those who are experienced in providing dementia care..and if nursing home care is needed you are looking at months not weeks. It's a broken and under funded system and has been for years and it's sadly the older people that suffer the most. Social services and health have always worked at loggerheads rather than together. I can remember arguing with someone about who would pay for a bed for a patient. He needed a new one as he couldn't get out of his current one and it couldn't be adapted. Health said it was a social need, social services said it was a health need, the man himself had no family or money so he was stuck in hospital until someone could find some organisation willing to buy him a new bed. (The alternative would have been expensive hoists and care staff coming in three times a day to get him in and out of bed). Those are the sorts of things that delay discharge.. funding has to be approved if the person can't fund themselves , equipment provided, care staff employed, or re deployed..

[YCCMB]

And believe it or not, I'm not criticising the professionals involved. My b-I-l can afford to pay for his care, but steadfastly refuses to do so. He has always been, er, parsimonious...and his condition has made it worse. Ultimately, if he doesn't pay, his estate will. He has always been rude, argumentative, unnecessarily cruel for no logical reason, and self-centred. If I was part of his care team, I'd probably have killed him by now, and his current illness has made all of his worst character traits worse, so anyone having to deal with him is, IMO, deserving of sainthood. Add to this a political position that makes Nigel Farage appear a bit of a lefty, and you can imagine that trying to get him to admit a carer from any ethnic minority into his home is a task.

Nevertheless, I see no reason why some of the things we've experienced in terms of lack of communication and progress have occurred.

And in another slightly off-piste occurrence, since being discharged back home, he has successfully applied to have his driving license renewed, which calls into question a system which supposedly (albeit cursorily, it seems) checks the physical and medical fitness to drive of people over 70. I know that's not the fault of his care team or the NHS, but it does make you wonder what the point is.

[idun]

Re the driving, people are supposed to be honest.

If he will be a danger on the road, contact his GP and tell them that he has had his licence renewed, and if he will be a danger on the roads, that you depend on them to contact the DVLA. I believe legally they are obliged to do just that.

[AnOther]

There NHS model is the only one of it's type in the world and for pretty obvious reason, it's unaffordable - or at least at a price UK taxpayers are prepared to pay for it to retain it's 'sacred cow hands off ' status.

It suffers too many ills and bad practices to even begin to list but to throw just two into the mix; there was a report in the news just recently (the result of a Freedom of Information request so fact not tittle tattle) about a GP who was making £700k per annum with the suggested justification being that he is probably a senior partner in a large group of practices or a federation. A disturbing number of others were reportedly raking in several hundreds of thousands and the unvarnished truth is that there is something deeply wrong with a system which makes such obscenities even possible.

Corbyn can shriek about privatisation as much as he likes but that began with PFI which, although originally a Conservative initiative under John Major, really took off and flourished massively during the ensuing Blair/Brown years.

[lindal1000]

My sister's GP rakes in quite a good additional income from running a private Botox clinic out of surgery hours. As GPs are technically small businesses would all that income have come from NHS work and thus from public money? Some have other interests and sources of income.

Betty, your uncle sounds like most of the patients I remember! Seriously though, as a general point setting up a care package in many cases is not always an easy thing to do for many of the reasons you describe.

I agree with Idun about the driving.

[YCCMB]

Already done. He probably didn't "lie" on his form, BTW. As far as he is concerned, he's not I'll at all. He refuses to accept his condition.

Going back to a question I posed a while back in another thread, and to pick up tangentially on AnOther's point: if the NHS model is, indeed, such a paragon, it does beg the question why no other country in the world has ever adopted it...

[richard51]

IMHO it is down to privatisation.

BTW: The last big injection of cash to the NHS was during the Blair/Brown era (CEO of NHS providers said yesterday)

1. the "internal market" in the NHS is an absurdity that does, indeed, cost a fortune. Managers trying to say that they have the same issues as private industry - no they implement policy from "above" and claim private firm salaries.

2. social care is indeed the biggest problem. Bed blocking has been going on for years. Council run care homes /step down hospital beds have been decimated. In their place has come private care homes with profiteering now that opposition has been removed - reduced quality and increased fees.

Too many posts in the NHS are there not to look after patients but "to look after the money".

Rant over.