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My anecdotal experience from family, friends and neighbours is that you need to be approximately one week away from dying to receive prompt medical attention.
The NHS remains hamstrung by the Nineteen-Fifties idealism that wonderful medical services could and should be provided free at the point of delivery. This business model has been unsustainable for decades.
When I was needing something looked at, I filled in a few details and they were reviewed by someone and I got a call same day to discuss and arrange an appointment when it was clear I’d need some tests. All very slick as were the follow up appointment. I also got all the test results the Dr saw and discussed and the prescription. All very slick.
Better to triage like that than have a tonne of less key cases turn up just for a chat and reassurance.
1. Yes the Tory party have utterly f*cked up Primary Care so that what was same day on average for GP appointments under last Labour gov (yes it was look it up) has changed into waiting an average of a month now for a routine appointment. This is part of their entirely deliberate plan to ruin the NHS then declare it broken and say only the private sector can save it. An example of this is the funding for it, great chart on this page:
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell
The calculation made by Labour was that to keep pace with the needs of a growing elderly population as people were living longer we would need a 5.5% increase in the budget year on year. Tory party got in and dropped it to 1.1% for 6 years then 2.8% from 2016 onwards. At 1.1% that was below inflation, as it has been last 2 years. They say 'record budgets' to hide the fact they are not funding the growing needs of the population. C*nts. Oh, and for anyone that comes out with the 'you can't keep giving them more money forever, it needs reforming not more money!' did you know that every quid spent on the NHS returns 3 quid back from a healthier working population?
2. Note I said ROUTINE appointment. Every surgery keeps a block of same day appointments that get given out for acute issues. If you have an ingrowing toenail, yeah sure wait a month. If you have a serious problem they will see you same day, or refer you to a local hospital if necessary. There is usually an on-call Doctor who has no routine appointments booked in who fulfils this role, and they are often very late home because of the sheer amount of people who want/need seeing urgently. Also....at least 90% of people who phone and say it's urgent are morons and it's not.
3. Training, yes they all need it and do it and that's on top of 10 hours of listening to moany old b*stards like you lot plus admin a day. At my local GP they start work at 8 and are all still there at 18:30 doing admin, prescriptions etc.
4. There are thousands more patients per GP surgery than there were....and with mental health services in crisis and community care defunded and destroyed GP's are picking up more and more responsibilities because there is no-one else. Primary Care is on its knees.
5. It's such a horrible job now, GP's are retiring early it's so bad, leaving the country, leaving the profession etc.
6. The latest Conservative bungle is to allocate a load of money to Primary Care but explicitly rule it to be only for non-GP roles at surgeries. This has meant surgeries CAN'T AFFORD TO EMPLOY MORE GP'S, and instead take nurses and Physicians assistants who while doing important jobs themselves can't plug the gap that's currently yawning.
1. Not enough money after years of Tory funding cuts in real terms while the population grows and ages...
2. Err... that's it.
God it makes my blood fucking boil...
It seems that most people aren't complaining about the workers, it’s just that how all that stuff you mentioned presents it's self to most people is not being able to get an appointment etc.
It's not bad here so seems like it very much depends on where you are. I'm fairly rural too.
Can they just not get doctors/staff in some areas in particular? Money not being dispersed properly?
What's the connection?
All of the things here are true. And, in fact, a combination of them - the impossibility of getting prompt access to treatment, repeated incompetence with regard to testing and broken-by-design systems and policies employed by the private companies taking over and consolidating GP practices - nearly actually killed my wife on two separate occasions in the last two years, as well as being the direct cause of the damage to her spine which means she's now disabled and she'll be in constant pain for the rest of her life.
That last one was over 10 years ago, long before the Tories' policies had a chance to directly damage the NHS, and was a direct result of a dismissive attitude from a series of doctors, nurses and administrative staff who all just passed the buck and completely ignored the actual problem. In the end, it took a private surgeon to clean up the mess they'd left as best he could; if she'd been treated even adequately when she first presented with a textbook slipped disc, none of that would've happened. One receptionist even told her to stop calling and bothering them when "there are people with real medical issues who need our attention".
These problems are very, very real and they're not just a bunch of old white guys moaning - every single condition which is put off by the processes the NHS is now using across the country is a condition that is going to get worse and cost even more to deal with later (unless the patient dies in the meantime). There are real consequences. I absolutely don't doubt that most NHS staff are good people, but pretending that all NHS staff are angels and relying on lazy tropes in order to dismiss real concerns and problems does absolutely nothing for your argument.
In summary...take your sanctimonious bullshit and shove it. Alternatively, hold back on the bullshit and stick to the facts, and you might actually have a point that's worth something.
@digitalscream I'm so sorry for that clearly appalling experience your family have had, but that's nothing to do with me, so seeing as it's fine to talk like you just did to me I'll reply in kind like I would in the pub... f*ck off talking to me like that. You're right not every healthcare practitioner is a saint, and I never said they were, and yes some horrendous mistakes can and do happen and even a single one is horrible but I'll tell you this, not every patient is a reasonable or decent person either, and for every Doc/Nurse doing their best there's hundreds of morons, hundreds of moaning b*stards, and hundreds of abusive d1ckheads too, and like I said while talking about what's been happening to the NHS is a disgrace, which it is, I won't abide a pile on when it comes to the staff, and it's not 'sanctimonious bullshit' to defend them or to point out what's actually gone on with the funding and collapse of services. Facts aren't opinions and facts aren't sanctimonius. I also won't take it when there's a load of lazy and untrue comments like there are in this thread, if you want to mention tropes go pick on Dominic with his 'they are always training and not doing any work' or the other chaps with the 'you can't see a GP unless you're dying' or just plain old 'you can't see a GP at all ever in the history of man anymore'
As for my comments being ageist, sexist, and racist....well.....that's horseshit, old white and male (and definitely moany) is an accurate observation of the demographic of this site and quite clearly of this thread. We (and I class myself here too) are privilged old white male moany fuckers in general, just look at how much time we waste pissing and moaning about Gibson changing a finish option or something. I just actually give a damn about this particular topic so I'll pipe up and call it out.
I'm not going to comment again because I'm not into arguing as has been proven a million times you can't change people's minds on the internet. I just wanted to enter a few facts into the record which has now been done.
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
The disappearance of that model has several causes.
3. Few doctors want to do GP.
In GP land you can have a high salary, provide a top-notch service or a have lot of time off but you can’t have all 3. They won’t tell you this but most NHS GP’s currently only see patients 3 or 4 days a week tops. Dr. Finlay they ain’t. They refer a lot.
My practice has 7 names up outside but 3 times in the last year we have received messages via the NHS app that there are no doctors in that day so don’t bother.
Or look for a GP who does both private and NHS. Mine does (we switched to a smaller practice outside of town to get away from Lakeside), and as a result will offer treatments that aren't available on the NHS because the NHS is either not capable of providing them any more or has arbitrary rules that are rooted in the 1980s. It feels shit to be effectively giving in to the government's picture of what healthcare should look like, but it's also a case of practicality.
829am open the NHS app
830am click appts and browse availability
831am have one booked for Friday
832am cough my guts up, roll over and go back to sleep