How to solve the NHS funding crisis

Red-Squirrel_2

funguy wrote: »

There could be a graded use of GP services where the NHS covers a yearly health check and also 2 or 3 appointments a year. Thereafter, there is a nominal charge of £10 per visit. This ensures no one has to forgo medical attention but might restrict multiple visits which may be unnecessary.

That's an absolutely terrible idea!

Punishment for being seriously or chronically ill, either physically or mentally, basically.

Arklight

Rough_Justice wrote: »

I wonder if you have any personal experience of getting GP appointments because from your post I strongly suspect not and that you've been reading our media scaremongering.

Where I live there are three surgeries locally.
At each, it is possible to get same day appointments - yes appointments, not "sit and wait" although at least two offer this option too.
This since Christmas BTW, as direct family members will attest.
Here at least, it already is "easier to access preliminary medical attention".
Walk-in or drop-in clinics do not exist here, it not being a city.

Where I live there should be 5 surgeries. One shut because it couldn’t recruit doctors and left 5000 patients looking for a new practise. One doesn’t exist because it was part of a contractual obligation for a new housing state, but it couldn’t recruit doctors so is now a 'community space'.

The one I am registered with has gone from offering easily obtainable same day appointments to starting you off with a recorded message from the practice manager asking you to please go away if at all possible because they are so overwhelmed. If you get through at 8am when the lines open you 'might' get an appointment at 4.30pm.

This is a Tory area in the Home Counties that is rapidly being closed in on by Labour and the Lib Dem’s (first Lib Dem councillor, first time in 50 years it's been a Labour marginal).

But keep saying everything's fine because we're making miles out it at the ballot box.

Herzlos

Rough_Justice wrote: »

I wonder if you have any personal experience of getting GP appointments because from your post I strongly suspect not and that you've been reading our media scaremongering.

Purely personal experience. If you phone up asking for a booked appointment you're looking at 2-3 weeks out. There's a drop-in every day from 8:30-10:30, where if you're in before 10:30 you'll be seen. The queue for that starts forming about 6:30, and even turning up at 8:31 will see you with at least an hours queue. In my experience the wait is usually around 2 hours, sometimes as bad as 3.

You can get seen a lot quicker if you've been referred by someone (I've been seen same day with pharmacist, or back a few days / 1 week later when re-booked by doctor).

So if you want to see a doctor here you need to either really want to, or have nothing better to do. It just feels like the system is designed to decrease productivity (by making you take a whole day off work when 30 minutes would have done).

Herzlos

LHW99 wrote: »

Possibly in the future surgeries could have a "smart system" which takes you through a basic triage when you book a GP appointment and assigns you to pharmacist, nurse, doctor, A&E based on the answers.
No access to any hospital unless you have been through the smart system and got a reference code, unless you're brought in flat on your back in an ambulance

I'd be all for that, or only being able to book an appointment with a triage nurse who'd pass you on to a doctor, or tell you to go to elsewhere. Essentially a human version of your system.

ukcarper

Arklight wrote: »

Where I live there should be 5 surgeries. One shut because it couldn’t recruit doctors and left 5000 patients looking for a new practise. One doesn’t exist because it was part of a contractual obligation for a new housing state, but it couldn’t recruit doctors so is now a 'community space'.

The one I am registered with has gone from offering easily obtainable same day appointments to starting you off with a recorded message from the practice manager asking you to please go away if at all possible because they are so overwhelmed. If you get through at 8am when the lines open you 'might' get an appointment at 4.30pm.

This is a Tory area in the Home Counties that is rapidly being closed in on by Labour and the Lib Dem’s (first Lib Dem councillor, first time in 50 years it's been a Labour marginal).

But keep saying everything's fine because we're making miles out it at the ballot box.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/

kabayiri

westernpromise wrote: »

Snort. Oh yes they would. No matter how much is spent on the NHS, its staff - and those who use it but pay nothing towards it - would complain. Always. There will never be a time when there is agreement that the NHS is completely funded and in need of nothing more. At the very least its staff - for whose benefit it is ultimately run - will want more money; they always have and always will.

Yep.

We are just tinkering at the edges. 1% extra won't save the NHS. Rising expectations, and things like rising obesity levels, will see to that.

Somehow, we need to switch to proactive health, rather than reactive.

Courtesy of onboard monitoring we know more about the health of our cars than we do our bodies.

So what about embedded chips? Is it too invasive for people?

Why can't we have a much more fluid private/public model on health, which changes according to regional need?

westernpromise

Herzlos wrote: »

Purely personal experience. If you phone up asking for a booked appointment you're looking at 2-3 weeks out. There's a drop-in every day from 8:30-10:30, where if you're in before 10:30 you'll be seen. The queue for that starts forming about 6:30, and even turning up at 8:31 will see you with at least an hours queue. In my experience the wait is usually around 2 hours, sometimes as bad as 3.

You can get seen a lot quicker if you've been referred by someone (I've been seen same day with pharmacist, or back a few days / 1 week later when re-booked by doctor).

So if you want to see a doctor here you need to either really want to, or have nothing better to do. It just feels like the system is designed to decrease productivity (by making you take a whole day off work when 30 minutes would have done).

I have a private GP and funnily enough he or one of his practice partners sees me whenever it suits me.

Herzlos

westernpromise wrote: »

I have a private GP and funnily enough he or one of his practice partners sees me whenever it suits me.

And that has what to do with the NHS?

Does anyone seem surprised or care that people who are willing to pay for treatment can be seen faster?

Why do you feel the need to brag about things like this on a forum about money saving?

tberry6686

venison wrote: »

The NHS is already being rationed simply by making people wait, many have to wait days to see a GP,I have recently waited 14 months to see a neurologist about what to me was a serious problem.
Charging everyone for prescriptions is not the answer as you would still have the expense of handling those who were entitled to not pay for them.
The real answer is to increase taxes if e.g NI went up 1% but the money was ring fenced for the NHS few would complain.

Personally I would not want to pay any more in tax and I don't know anyone who would. Easy way to raise extra money to pour down the NHS bottomless pit is to cut back on other areas of the nanny state.

westernpromise

Herzlos wrote: »

And that has what to do with the NHS?

Does anyone seem surprised or care that people who are willing to pay for treatment can be seen faster?

Why do you feel the need to brag about things like this on a forum about money saving?

Why do you feel the need to gob off and scold people? Who put you in charge?

If a private GP can manage to see patients on demand, why can't the NHS? The answer is that the NHS is run for the benefit of its employees, whereas a private GP practice is run for the benefit of its patients. This is a small but to some an unimaginable difference. If the patients aren't benefiting they go elsewhere. This is a powerful incentive to give them what they want.

Things you absolutely never hear from the private health sector are that it's falling apart, or that it's in crisis, or that it's at breaking point. Yet the private health sector pays its staff pretty much the same as the monopsony NHS does, and doesn't benefit from the economies of scale available to the gigantic, Stalinist NHS. Why is that? Because if a private hospital is crap, or is surplus to requirements, or is insufficiently better than the local NHS, it goes out of business. It has to subsist on what it's worth.

The NHS in contrast is always in crisis, is always falling apart and is always at breaking point. I was washing dishes in the local NHS hospital as a summer job aged 16 in 1980 and sure enough the NHS was, according to the staff, in crisis, falling apart and at breaking point then too. It was in crisis, falling apart and at breaking point in 1981 when I went back after my A Levels and sure enough it was still in crisis, falling apart and at breaking point when I returned at the end of my first year at university in 1983.

My mother had a stroke last year and was taken into the very same NHS hospital that I'd worked at 37 years before and that had supposedly been falling apart throughout that time. In the 1980s and 1990s, the workhouse buildings ( = Labour NHS) had been demolished or retired and replaced with new construction (= Tory NHS). The food was radically better, there was a decent canteen and so on. Hundreds of millions have been poured into the place. The thanks the taxpayer gets for funding all this is to be told the NHS is in crisis, falling apart and at breaking point and gimme even more money.

Some things don't change and it's idle to imagine they will. If you doubled what we squander on the NHS, all that would happen is that the headcount would increase, and they'd want more money. Survival rates and deaths from starvation would remain much the same. The staff would still b!tch that the NHS was in crisis, falling apart and at breaking point because it's what they do. There is no level of funding at which the NHS and its staff would throw up their hands and say Enough! Stop! We are fairly paid and adequately resourced - take all this money away!

It's a bit like football. All the money poured into it has fallen straight through into the players' pockets. The quality of the football has not changed.

Once you recognise that, all the whining can be seen for the snivelling after other people's money that it is. Tube drivers make 60 grand a year but, as always with the public sector, you never hear a syllable of gratitude or appreciation to the taxpayers who fund it all. What you get instead are surly demands for even more money, plus constant, pretty much annual threats to strike over "safety" concerns that are only ever allayed by more money - odd, that.

But when obese slobs who eat deep fried Mars bars and smoke 40 a day are treated for nothing by the NHS having never contributed a penny to it, while people like me who present no such risk and don't use it are milked to fund the whole thing, it's clear the NHS is essentially a health insurance business that fails to consider or charge for risk. So of course it's structurally insolvent and of course nobody has ever been stupid enough to copy it.