My suggestion – A big fine for people who make Dr's appointments and don't turn up. According to my local surgery, it averages 170 appointents a week.

The only exceptions would be people who have a Dr's note excusing them . . . .

Systematic culling of the non-working classes.

It'd keep the top-hats who go hunting occupied weekly too.

Get rid of anesthetic. That way people will only ask for an operation if they really need it.

Get rid of anything that isn't essential…

Fertility treatment
Fat reduction/bands etc
Breast reduction
Gender reassignment
I'm sure there are many more

Cut any expensive treatment that only extends life a year or two

Allow anyone who wants the above to get it at cost if they pay for it.

Encourage people to opt out – stop taxing private medical cover at 40%!! Make medical cover tax deductible instead.

Prohibitive fines for any treatment required as the result of alcoholic intoxication.

Billywhizz, your idea sounds great in principle, but maybe it should work the other way too- maybe the GP should be fined to compensate me when I am kept waiting for forty minutes before every appointment 🙂
Fairs fair and all

Refuse to treat anyone with ailments caused by their excessive eating, drinking and smoking

Fertility treatment not essential? Oh great more fekkin kids being born then

Prohibitive fines for any treatment required as the result of alcoholic intoxication.

Thing is with that, what's next?

Prohibitive fines for people injured falling off mountains whilst riding bicycles? It's an equally stupid pursuit in some people's eyes.

a limit on the hours served weekly by doctors. The amount of staff sickness in the NHS is shocking.

Prohibitive fines for people injured falling off mountains whilst riding bicycles? It's an equally stupid pursuit in some people's eyes.

I wouldn't mind mandatory insurance for ALL organised sports and ALL road users.

5th – will the private sector compensate the state sector for taking the staff that the state sector trained at great expense? ATM it pays nothing towards training costs and they are not insignificant

As on the other thread I'd stop:

Transplants except kidney.
cognitive enhancers for dementia
Fertility treatments
Herceptin and similar treatments. £10 000 per month of extra time to die
Statins except in a tiny majority of cases
RTAs charge the full amount to the insurance instead of a token charge as they are supposed to do now ( but rarely do)
All plastic surgery except for trauma repair and repair after surgery.
End all private healthcare. Its expensive and drains NHS resources.

right – that should be a controversial list.

All non essential medical shite moved to private sector (cosmetic surgery etc

retro83 – Member

a limit on the hours served weekly by doctors. The amount of staff sickness in the NHS is shocking.

Its not actually that high – comparable with other industries – around 4% in my trust
Drs are down to 56 hrs soon if not already from the 140 they use to work

Prohibitive fines for people injured falling off mountains whilst riding bicycles?

It's a slippery slope, for sure. But I notice that A+E is not currently overrun with injured mountain bikers, whereas you can't move for drunks…

EDIT: I should say, I'm being slightly tongue-in-cheek – as the reality of treating ?drunk?head trauma?fitting etc patients in A+E is (obviously) a serious & complex thing. But the amount of NHS resources tied up in treating alcohol related stuff is truly mind-boggling. It'd be nice to break the link.

a limit on the hours served weekly by doctors

Although not at the expense of training or medical cover – as has been the result of the new working hours directive/MMC reforms. Ergo, more doctors, please.

about 4 million quid a year is spent by the NHS to support homeopathy

darrell – and strangely shown to be cost effective! its cheap per treatment and it reduces referrals for real treatment! weird but true.

4 million is 0,004% of the budget.

This may help (from NHS website)…

'Some 60% of the NHS budget is used to pay staff. A further 20% pays for drugs and other supplies, with the remaining 20% split between buildings, equipment and training costs on the one hand and medical equipment, catering and cleaning on the other.'

I spy pay freezes, to pay for consultants, who identify inefficient work practices, and identify areas for redundancy, only for the NHS management to realise that the consultants cost a lot more than the redundancies saved, 'sh1t, who can we fire now'.

5th – will the private sector compensate the state sector for taking the staff that the state sector trained at great expense? ATM it pays nothing towards training costs and they are not insignificant

I didn't suggest opting out of NI payments. So you'd pay full whack for the NHS like you do now, but if you choose to pay for private cover you wouldn't get charged 40% for doing so. Which is why I don't have private cover as a point of principal. If you actually made private cover deductible you'd lower the number of users without a great impact on the revenue raised to fund the NHS.

ANY pedestrian or driver, or DIYer, or any other person admitted with a head injury, that wasn't wearing a helmet- no treatment ( that should save, at least, 400 billion by my calculation) 😉

only for the NHS management to realise that the consultants cost a lot more than the redundancies saved

Indeed.

"darrell – and strangely shown to be cost effective! its cheap per treatment and it reduces referrals for real treatment! weird but true.

4 million is 0,004% of the budget. "

but as an educated person i am appalled that the NHS spends this money on "snakeoil". i would much rather the money was wasted on something else

that wasn't wearing a helmet

This thread is gonna run… 😀

Noteeth,It was a spur of the moment bad joke! I'm SORRY!

Don't worry – I can't see anybody getting too worked up… 🙂

darrell – and strangely shown to be cost effective! its cheap per treatment and it reduces referrals for real treatment! weird but true.

Not going to dispute this but I do hope that the medication used is just tap water, not bought off some company that alleges there is something special about thier medicines.

If we could move to full tap water medicine you could cut almost 20% from the bill.

I'd forgotten about alternative therapy. Stop wasting tax payers money on it and tax it at 500%.

Try listening to the people who do the job and getting their ideas on what works and what is a waste of money rather than paying vast amounts of money to people who have never done the job, and in some cases can't spell job, to come up with a succession of impractical ideas for money saving and reform.

Of course if the ideas they came up with DID work then we wouldn't need them to advise the NHS anymore – or am I missing something here.

Banning smoking

5th- "Fat reduction/bands etc"

Most auditing suggests these are cheaper than dealing with the long term consequences of obesity.

Just one example but lots of things that look at first glance like unneccesary treatments or throwing money away, actually aren't.

I'm working my 8th night out of the last 10 nights, so whatever you all decide, please do it quietly and don't;

Fall down stairs,
Crash your car,
Have an operation,
Get an infection,
or otherwise get poorly in anyway.

Thanks.

"I didn't suggest opting out of NI payments. So you'd pay full whack for the NHS like you do now, but if you choose to pay for private cover you wouldn't get charged 40% for doing so."

I agree. I dont resent my tax contribution to support people who rely on the NHS. But I'm appalled that my work-arranged medical insurance is taxed this way. It stops people from joining it. The company and I have that insurance to keep me working and making my contribution to the business, the economy, and I dont drain the social security or NHS!

They do need to find a way to claim some financial compensation from wasted drunks and drug users that ram AandE every weekend. You cannot compare this with sport injuries. And a fine might be a disincentive to drunkenness knowing they may have to budget another £100-£500 on a big night out.

Banning smoking

Isn't legally possible, I'm afraid.

Keeping visitors out of acute hospitals would significantly reduce infection, and therefore effect a cost-saving.

Turn the thermostats down in all hospitals by 5 degrees – no one will notice.

I'm with TJ on the fertility treatments, plastic surgery and banning all private health care.

Reduce the length of NHS gowns by 2 inches. Think of the miles of fabric saved and should be a bit of a laugh (which according to the Readers' Digest is the best medicine of all).

£50.00 fine for anyone who complains about the length of time they've had to wait in A & E.

No private concessions (shops, vending machines, coffee bars, extortionate television rental schemes etc). Nationalise the lot and put any profit back in the NHS.

in return for paying a slightly reduced rate of income tax commensurate to the drop in expenditure per capita (bear with me….), grumpy taxpayers can be treated exclusively in "The 1960's Hospital" which will undoubltedly be cheaper, cleaner and smaller, but also feature nurses with paper hats, no choice whatsoever, even worse food, even more godlike and unlistening consultants and an alarmingly narrow range of drugs and surgical procedures.

Volunteers? 😀

More seriously, it is actually alarmingly hard to get sacked from the NHS if you are just fairly bad at your job or a bit work-shy. Unless you do anything positively wrong, poor performance which would have you out on your ear in no time in private enterprise can take years and untold man-hours of meetings and correspondence at senior level to actually get you dismissed. I'd love someone in my HR department to look over our trust's last 5 years poor performance cases and try and calculate in money what they could have saved if they could have fired people a bit quicker (or at all!!).

And as sponging machine says, visitors are an enormously unpoliceable, errr, "variable" in the fuzzy arena of infection control.

Allow people a dignified death!

Get rid of ambulance response time targets, that way we wont send an ambulance, a car and a supervisor (as the only qualified paramedic) to teenagers having panic attacks and we can focus on patient care instead!

Also, greater allowance for staff to work in different areas… i.e train everyone to HCA level so when one area is quiet staff can move around or help out, drives me mad when A&E is run ragged and staff are sitting about to SFA upstairs on wards!

Anyone injured through a DIY related accident should only be provided with the materials to patch themselves up.

but as an educated person i am appalled that the NHS spends this money on "snakeoil". i would much rather the money was wasted on something else

Counter intuitive though it may seem, spending more on 'snakeoil' may cut overall costs 😯
I think (haven't looked for stats but have anecdotal evidence from GPs) that many people visit their doctor simply for reassurance and a bit of attention, if more "counselors" (for want of a better word) were employed medical admissions/prescriptions may be reduced.

On a less controversial note, perhaps increasing health education/promotion may be more cost effective than medical intervention as a result of avoidable health problems ?

Oh, and make people financially liable for irrelevant use of emergency services…..

Abolish "protected salaries"

Remove the target system that means doctors don't offer advance appointments and get paid more.

24/7 utilisation of every major asset where possible. MRI scanners and the like.

Increased employment. Seriously. There are people walking around that look like the living dead. I don't care what they do, so long as they're doing something, and sober for at least 8 hours a day.

Some research on the price elasticity of booze and a minimum price / unit if it will actually cut consumption.

Proper home economics taught in schools.

Massive sentences for drug dealing.

Improved road design. 300 people a year croak it after driving into trees at the side of the road.

I suspect the big savings are to be made in cutting demand…