Criticism of the NHS: What are they on about?

Now, I know the NHS is not perfect, and I am sure there are hospitals out there in need of a good clean and a management overhaul, but…

Both my wife and I have been guests of the Welsh NHS numerous times, and have found it wonderful, both in terms of hospital treatment and other coverage.

By comparison, my father underwent a radical operation at North Manchester Hospital back in March and would not be here today if it had not been for their incredible attention.

Yet today, the Daily Mail (I won’t link to the story) is on about how the Welsh NHS is a failure and will be the model for what Ed Milliband will do in England.

WTF are they on about? How is the Welsh NHS a failure?!?

Frankly, I don’t get all the criticism of the NHS. Yes, it has to be scrutinised, but considering the incredible work they do, I would think that this constant nonsense spouted in the press is just demoralising and unhelpful.

Or am I wrong, and the [Welsh] NHS really is in dire straits?

They have to report it as a failure as that justifies private “investment”.

Its quite simple.

The Tory party, and their friends in the right wing press, basically HATE the fact that ‘their‘ taxes (which they sometimes even pay!) goes towards keeping poor people alive. Even though they’ve probably brought it on themselves with their Lambert and Butler, and their ugg boots and their cheap supermarket multipacks of Stella, and their big tellies and pizza deliveries.

Whats more, their corporate mates don’t even make any (well… not that much) cash out of it (yet) to fill their offshore tax-dodging bank accounts

So it has to end!! And fast!!! So they undermine the principle of the NHS at every turn, to justify destroying/privatising it

you’re not wrong, the Daily mail is, about more or less everything.

(you can use it as a back-up moral Compass)

and, what Binners Said.

NHS Wales replied: http://wales.gov.uk/newsroom/healthandsocialcare/2014/141020daily-mail/?lang=en&&&&&&

Short answer: ALL parties use the NHS as a political point scoring tool. Until this stops things won’t improve hugely. There are difficult decision ahead in some ways re cost of healthcare and what is provided and not. There are also efficienc savings to be made in many areas with the right approach.

Most NHS staff try their very best.

Jet (NHS doc)

binners is on the right track

The mail is a hateful, hateful! rag, nothing good to say about anything!

+ what binners said

The NHS has been brilliant with me and my condition (Leukaemia), great treatment and fast too, no hanging around at all, tests and biopsy’s done there and then and fast results and onto chemo there and then. Nice caring and helpful Dr’s, nurses and staff throughout.

I really can’t fault them, in again tomorrow to see my consultant.

Negative headlines and stories sell more papers than positive ones.

chvck that article is interesting, talk of 31 days from diagnosis to starting treatment.

From the point I had my diagnosis I had started my treatment in hours! that initial treatment lasted a few weeks, with regular monitoring and then immediately started on my long term treatment path within two weeks, still on weekly or biweekly checks and tests and appointments at the moment.

No the NHS isn’t perfect by any means but it’s pretty damned good, and in my personal experience, just fantastic!

jambalaya – Member
Negative headlines and stories sell more papers than positive ones.

I bet they’d sell some more papers if they put some puppies on page 3. Just look at these babies….

Back on topic…. the Tories know that the labour party constantly polls higher on the NHS than them. Rightfully too. Everyone knows the Tories just want to hand the lot over, as a private monopoly, to their mates, as another way to fleece us all, funnelling billions in taxpayers money into their front companies in Luxembourg, for ever poorer services. But once they’ve managed it, there will be no going back. The principle of the NHS will be over!

We’ve got an election coming up, so for their attack dogs at the Mail/Express/Times/Torygraph/Sun its now open season on the very principle of the ‘failing’ NHS! Which is probably tantamount to socialism/communism anyway

The good thing is that it doesn’t seem to be working, as people generally aren’t that stupid! So **** off Dave!!! We all still remember ‘There will be no top down reorganisation of the NHS. Honest!’, and this crap….

the Daily Mail (I won’t link to the story) is on about how the Welsh NHS is a failure and will be the model for what Ed Milliband will do in England.

Daily Mail = Tory supporter
General Election = Soon

No the NHS isn’t perfect by any means but it’s pretty damned good, and in my personal experience, just fantastic!

+1

Eh, surely the welsh NHS is nothing to do with Dave 😕

and as for reorganisation…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-21297850

I wish people would stop conflicting the Daily Mail with the conservative party.

I am pretty much conservative and wouldn’t wipe my backside with the mail.

Not every tory reads the Mail
Everyone who reads the Mail is a ****! And we all know who they tend to vote for

I was in hospital for a broken back last year. The downsides were that some of the agency nursing staff were verging on incompetent and the after-care transport was a shambles.

Everything else, including the food (!), was to an excellent standard. Including, clearly, the actual operation and it’s outcome.

I’d say (from my experience) that there are issues that need sorting that could be to do with funding and to some extent, better organisation.

The problem is, when financial resources are under extreme pressure, there are going to be holes that need to be filled. If the private sector is not involved in this, how are things to improve?

The Tory party, and their friends in the right wing press, basically HATE the fact that ‘their’ taxes (which they sometimes even pay!) goes towards keeping poor people alive

This. A million times this.

Up until quite recently I managed 3 urgent care NHS dental sites. They are open 365 days a year and operate from 8 in the morning until 8 at night.

One of the more “fun” jobs was explaining to the private patients that would call on a weekend was no, they wouldn’t get preferential treatment, or appts that would suit their teeing off time ( I wish I was joking, but I’m not) and that yes, all our dentists were from outside the UK but were suitably qualified, and that yes the brand new facility they found themselves in was open to all and sundry.

Some of them hated, and I use the word advisedly that “the poor” could get the same treatment at the same location by the same dentist for the same money as them.

The Tory party, and their friends in the right wing press, basically HATE the fact that ‘their’ taxes (which they sometimes even pay!) goes towards keeping poor people alive.

Well I’d say they hate their money being wasted in inefficient ways – well I do. NHS is good just not efficient.

I am pretty much conservative and wouldn’t wipe my backside with the mail.

I wouldn’t wipe my backside with a tory voter. My crap is too good for that.

The NHS certainly isn’t perfect… but the HaSC Act is making the situation much worse, IMO. Services are being fragmented left, right & centre – and the hiving off of “profitable” services (e.g. routine elective surgery in the generally fit n’ well) will do nothing for the kind of vulnerable patients who are most at risk from poor care. Meanwhile, all manner of interests are making hay – the sight of accountancy/consultancy groups “advising” indebted Hospital Trusts being particularly ironic… many of them “advised” on PFI, etc in the first place, FFS! Monitor & NHS England and all are now heavily staffed by much the same types – all intent on fudging in “competition”, regardless of the gathering chaos on the ground. Overall, I’d say it’s a 50/50 mix of deliberate [ideological] policy and utter fugging political ignorance – cast your mind back to when chumps like Simon Burns MP defended these reforms, despite heavy criticism from the frontline…

There are problems in Wales (see, for example, Private Eye) – but they reflect issues (overstretched wards, collapsing morale) that are also all-too-common in England – so it’s pretty rich of the Fail/Tories to use Wales as a political scorecard, given how much damage the incumbent lot have done to the NHS over ‘ere. NuLab need to tread carefully, too – they introduced much of the pseudo-market managerialism that skewed clinical priorities, besides setting the whole privatisation train in motion.

Finally, given how disingenuous the media have been in their treatment of the NHS (and NHS staff), this recent Times headline was pretty amusing… it’s not as if they weren’t warned about the likely consequences of Lansley’s reforms! 😈

+1 to Binners, we’ve just had our 2nd child on the NHS (both home births) and had exemplary care on both occasions.

If my leg’s hanging off I don’t want to browse a few brochures to see which local provider has the best stats I want a bloody ambulance! Preferably staffed by staff who are motivated by making people better and not how much cash they can squeeze out of you.

But of course that doesn’t make the people Tory donors play golf with any money so it must be changed!

Ed Milliband could strike a huge knockout blow on this but he’s either in someone’s pocket or as big a wet blanket as the media love to portray him as.

mudshark – Member

NHS is good just not efficient.

according to:

“the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington-based foundation which is respected around the world for its analysis of the performance of different countries’ health systems… …The United Kingdom ranks first overall, scoring highest on quality, access and efficiency,”

ok, i’ll admit that i found that on the Grauniad.

Oh and for those trying to make the point that getting the private sector involved will somehow make things ‘more efficient’ takes a look at our American cousins who in 2012 they spent 17.9% of GDP on private healthcare as opposed to our 9.4%.

Source: World Bank report

So is the NHS ‘efficient’ maybe not, but it’s a damn sight more efficient than what’s being brought in by stealth and at least our system cares for everyone and nobody gets bankrupted for being ill.

The mainstay of Lansleys reforms was to open up the NHS to EU competition law, so that rapacious private healthcare firms could cherry pick the profitable services from the NHS, while leaving the unprofitable bits, the important difficult stuff, the stuff that costs money, time and skill, to the state to pick up the tab. Or mount legal action if they were prevented from doing this! FFS!

My mum spent her entire working life in the NHS, as a midwife, then a health visitor. Unlike me, my mums a caring, considerate, and thoughtful person, but if you get her onto the subject now, of what this shower of ****s are doing to dismantle the NHS, she can become apoplectic with rage! And she holds Nu Labour just as responsible for starting the whole process in the first place.

But what Lansley did was shameful! But typical! Representing the interests of his corporate paymasters, to the detriment of every taxpayer in this country. The NHS is now at the mercy of predatory corporations, whose only interest is profit. And thats what the Tories planned right from the off. Except they forgot to mention that in their last manifesto. Shame that, really. If I recall, they actually said the complete opposite. And they wonder why we despise them? And their poll ratings on the NHS are so abysmal

Yes the NHS could be more efficient in many ways no doubt.

But! Does anybody (who’s not going to personally profit from it) believe that there are enough efficiency improvements to be had that all the problems can be righted and also enable a significant profit for shareholders too?

And can anybody please explain to me why it’s seemly impossible for a Tory (and others) to believe a public body can improve and become in anyway efficient/cost effective? It seem to be endless said that:
Public = poor quality, inefficient and poor value for money
and
Private = Perfect efficiency and great service for all users of the service

I think we could all give example of where those “Rules” appear to be broken.

she can become apoplectic with rage

After years of service, I don’t blame her. Good healthcare builds on the foundation of work that’s gone before – the work she did.

NHS Wales replied

so, any chance of them suing the mail?

Negative made up bullshit headlines and stories sell more papers than positive ones.

FT….

so, any chance of them suing the mail?

Thus generating a set of headlines of “NHS Spending Millions on Legal Departments to Stifle Criticism”?

chvck – Member

NHS Wales replied: http://wales.gov.uk/newsroom/healthandsocialcare/2014/141020daily-mail/?lang=en&&&&&&

Amongst the services provided by the Welsh NHS are cancer treatment and apocalyptic bitch slaps.

I look after someone in their late sixties who has many things wrong with and as such under consultants at 5 hospitals.
All of which have provided exemplary service.

In the last two years he has had to be taken to A&E by ambulance 4 times and then admitted.
The treatment he has received has been shocking and abusive in some cases.

He had one hip replacement and one hip revision with in a week of each other at stanmore hospital which was fantastic in every way.
Shortly after being sent home he developed stomach issues which caused him y be admitted to watford general.
I explained about his hip wound on the revision side had not healed yet and need to be kept clean.

Long story short the only time the checked or cleaned the wound in weeks was when I made an official complaint about how the wound was looking more and more infected and leeking, even then they were not interested telling me they were treating his stomach not hip.

As soon as he was released I took him to stanmore who could not beleive it and had to do a second revision costing the NHS another £13000. And risking my friends life under anaesthetic as we had to battle to get the hips done in the first place as his serious heart problems mad him high risk.

I have seen a male nurse deliberately pinch him out of spite and had to tell a lady to bring food in to feed her elderly husband every day as he had not eaten in days as his meals were put down and then cleaned away untouched as he could not feed himself.

You do not want to get old and infirm and at the mercy of the health service if you cannot or have no one to stand up for you.

My BIL is the CEO of a big NHS hospital in the south and a nicer, more decent and dedicated bloke you couldn’t hope to meet. However I’ve seen the effect of the stress of the job on his personality and it’s not doing him any long-term good, he told me that since the buck stops with him, most of his private time is spent in keeping up with facts and figures so that he can rebuff the attacks coming constantly from the media, the public and avaricious lawyers. At any one time the hospital is fighting around 20 cases in court, a good few of them from disgruntled staff trying for compo.

In my experience, which is pretty broad – there are people who knock the NHS and spread all the lies and bullshit about it, and then there’s people who’ve actually had to use it who usual gush about how well they were treated.

Three points:

1. The NHS is now paying out more than £1Bn a year to settle negligence claims. Many of these claims reflect failures to undertake simple checks, follow the right process or listen to the patient. Even by its own conservative estimates, 6,000+ patients are dying in secondary care due to the poor clinical practice they experience.

2. The CQC has said that patient care is unsafe in more 80% of the hospitals they have inspected so far in England this year.

3. Despite the huge amounts of money spent on cancer care over the last decade, NHS outcomes remain poor when compared to other health systems that have spent less – it’s not about spending more money it’s about getting the system to enable appropriate referrals and treatment without the patient having to manage the process themselves.

Putting these together, there’s a continuum of hit and miss care, poor communication and lack of compassion for patients. There’s also an ostrich-like syndrome amongst some NHS staff that the NHS is perfect, and anyone who has a poor experience or loses a relative in circumstances that could have been reasonably avoided is just out to vilify the whole service and / or just wants to privatise it.

If you’ve been in the position of seeing relatives getting consistently poor care and seeing staff spending no time at all with patients because they are so busy chatting / texting etc. you’d probably be equally frustrated – it’s worth saying that many NHS staff also feel this way but feel unable to speak up and challenge the behaviour of their colleagues.

All he specialist care we have had you could not fault, but under general medicine from ambulance service to A&E staff to the wards has been, well it’s like watching people spinning plates.

“The mainstay of Lansleys reforms was to open up the NHS to EU competition law, so that rapacious private healthcare firms could cherry pick the profitable services from the NHS, while leaving the unprofitable bits, the important difficult stuff, the stuff that costs money, time and skill, to the state to pick up the tab. Or mount legal action if they were prevented from doing this! FFS!”

This seems to conveniently overlook what the last government because most people really can’t have failed to miss the following that all started under the last government:

1. The use of Private Sector treatment sectors
2. The change to Primary Care contracts to enable new entrants to enter the “market”
3. The privatisation of Primary Care at night
4. The agreement to follow EU procurement rules for tender and tender all contracts publically
3. The massive use of PFI that has saddled the NHS with c£150Bn of debt
4. The plans for acute trust reconfigurations were drawn up by Andy Burnham – as was the £20B Efficiency “cut” he now bangs on about

The “massive” privatisation in the current government still only reflects around 5% of NHS Opex – this is barely changed from the last government and includes the likes of Macmillan Cancer Care who are by default treated as “private” because the provision isn’t done by the NHS.

Lots of people seem very happy to band about rabble rousing claims like “rapacious private healthcare firms can cherry pick the profitable services from the NHS” but where is the evidence for the level of activity actually being markedly higher now than 2009?

Rob. I’m not disputing any of what the Nu Labour lot did. They did indeed open the door to private provision, and the rolling disaster of PFI

But The Lansley reforms of laying the NHS open to competition law, now changes the rules of the game completely. It alters the fundamental structure of the NHS, by allowing private healthcare companies to demand access, as their right, to the NHS. And then demand recompense (from us) if they’r denied this.

At the very least, this means the NHS spending valuable resources fighting endless legal battles with these ‘rapacious corporations, and their highly funded legal departments. Money that will have to come from frontline services

This process has barely even begun. But its started and is now irreversible. It will end up leading to the wholesale privatisation of the profitable bits of… the NHS, leaving the taxpayer saddled with the bits they’re not interested in. You can level a lot of accusations at the previous government, but they didn’t do anything as malevolent as that. Its a time bomb that will ultimately destroy the health service as we know it!

Burnham was on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday and basically said that the privatisation he presided over was good privatisation whereas any current privatisation is bad privatisation 😆

And he’s got a valid point. Read what I’ve just posted above. What Lansley has done is massively, fundamentally different from anything that went before it, with huge implications

Would be very interesting to see the figures between %age NHS budget spent on privatised services versus %age spent on PFI

I know theres one NHS trust that recently claimed 16% of its budget was servicing one PFI deal 😯