UK Politics Thread (Part 2)

That’s catastrophic, my dad used to visit patients at home on his way home if he felt it was necessary.
It’s not even worrying anymore it’s gone well past that!

It’s shifting the blame from the government that has caused this crisis to the general public. Grant Shapps was doing the rounds yesterday blaming the war in Russia don’t give them ideas. Don’t give them ideas, for fucks sake.

Obviously the NHS aren’t treating people with papercuts before stroke victims. That’s the basic principle of Triage.

The crisis in the NHS has been caused by a few different factors, but they all come down to how the Government is choosing to approach national healthcare.

Staff are quitting in droves, faster than they can be replaced, because they are underpaid and overworked. Infrastructure is falling apart and there is a shortage of beds and space in hospitals. There is the continued neglect of the crisis in social care, which means that people with social care emergencies are presenting at hospital, which puts addition pressure on services, and the increased supply costs as a result of Brexit aren’t going to help either.

At the heart of this is the question of funding. The Government claim that record amounts of money is going into the NHS. But that is only half the story. That money is not going where it is needed because of the creeping privatisation over the last two decades and the culture of creaming off the top that the private sector brings. It’s now costing the NHS much more to deliver routine procedures, or even trivial things like cleaning and disposal services. These have been forced into the private sector by the Government, the NHS is having the pay through the nose, and that is drastically eating into the finances.

It should never be forgotten that the overriding aim of this government is to feather their own nests. That’s true of Covid, it’s true of the NHS. Trains. Energy. They see their purpose in power as being to extract as much money from the public purse as possible and put it in the bank accounts of already wealthy private individuals they are connected to. Everything should be seen through that prism.

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That in itself is a problem of staff shortage. You not waiting for discharge because they are mollycoddling you - they really want you out of that bed.

Every time I’ve been in the position of waiting for discharge it’s getting the doctor round to discharge that is the issue.

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The doctor had discharged her the night before.
She didn’t see a doctor on the morning of discharge.

You know what I mean. You are waiting for discharge because someone has to process your discharge. They get to you when they can. It’s a staffing issue.

The guy in the knee brace likely had another issue that caused him to be seen that day, such as banging his head and getting a serious concussion when they sustained the knee injury.

People who are going to A&E for ‘splinters’ do not get seen. They process people through a triage system, not first come first served. If you show up with an extremely minor injury you will be triaged and informed that there is an extremely long wait - in all likelihood you would never get called.

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It’s a management issue. Assigning staff to maximise throughput is entirely management. exactly the kind of management that’s pruned when cuts are made (NPI). 10 mins to discharge somebody is a better use of time than 10 mins bandaging a minor cut. The bigger my business gets, the more I see this as I spend less time doing what I did and more time doing management shit. But certain jobs are sacrosanct, stock is required to sell but the google hours are wrong and there’s somebody with a complaint. At a headteacher interview, the common task used to be the inbox test. You have 5 mins to work out the priority of dealing with the morning’s communications. Child welfare number one then busk the rest.

I wonder the cost of every hospital employing 3 people (rota) to be purely responsible for getting people out. How many people in a hospital bed actually need to be there? Yes social care etc but the one night I had in hospital, I didn’t need to be there, nor did anybody on my ward.

Not just the Tories

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I’m starting to think this might be a parody account?

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What if you can’t discharge the person if the bandage hasn’t been done?

Not sure if anyone has seen this but it is particularly vile:

At the moment he hasn’t even had the common decency to remove the Tweet:

It’s worth pointing out that one part of the Holocaust was to withhold vaccines from those that wanted to dispose of.

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Also worth noting that he’s citing a right-wing conspiracy theorist site…

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I was assuming that was a given.

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I doubt it. NHS has more managers now than it has ever done but it is also doing more than it’s ever done thanks to eroding services such as social care.

Can the NHS be more efficient? Most certainly but it is ultimately hamstrung by political decisions.

The situation is one that 100% sits at the feet of governments, plural.

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It’s smarting to read anecdotes about the NHS being inefficient in rather trivial ways as if that is the reason it is on its arse.

The conservatives, as is their wont, have purposefully underfunded and decimated our public services. A nurse not seeing a patient that you (with limited information) think is more deserving than another means absolutely nothing.

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Wasn’t suggesting that was the reason, I completely agree the government are massively at fault for the state of the NHS. Doesn’t mean everyone in the NHS is perfect and examples of such cant be suggested.

Covid plays a major part in the state of it too, massive backlogs need to be caught up and with limited staff numbers it impacts all areas.

My missus suffers from a very aggressive glaucoma.
She’s had multiple operations to slow down it’s progression, they’ve now done all they can, albeit too late.
She’s just had her driving licence revoked as she can’t satisfy the minimum standard of vision.

Her consultant told her last year, “Covid has stolen your vision”.
This is down to routine checks not being done for around 18 months during the pandemic.
If they’d performed the operations at an earlier stage of her condition, her vision wouldn’t have deteriorated to the extent it has.

Hers is only one of thousands of examples, thankfully hers wasn’t a life threatening condition, unlike many poor souls who’ve lost their lives because life saving treatments and follow ups weren’t done during the pandemic.

For clarity much of the inefficiencies I refer to are those that come part and parcel of being a government owned organisation. The hoops to jump through on occasions are crazy and that costs vast amounts of money but the constant farming out of services is really frustrating to me. With public procurement being that animal that it is it’s just open to being siphoned dry and creating even greater inefficiencies.

And that is exactly how it’s playing out from what I’ve seen. More and more resources and cash being used on procuring, and managing services, be that agency labour, vasectomies, cleaning or catering than there are actually treating people. That’s before you get to the staff shortages.

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I think it’s partly a symptom of a pandemic/Brexit but in other ways.

No different to any other industry that has an over reliance upon foreign labour (from fruit picking to hospitality) the pandemic/Brexit cut off the supply of workforce.

For years it has been highlighted the UK has been dependent on taking doctors and nurses from India, Philippines and Africa. Over the last 3 years the pandemic stopped people migrating and I would guess after being on the front line many have returned to be with friends and families.

Approx 23% of nurses or doctors have a different nationality that’s a high proportion.
Honestly if I was a young doctor or nurse in a poor nation, Australia, NZ, or many European countries are looking more attractive at the moment.

Anecdotally, the surgery I am registered with in NZ the doctors are all British. My parents doctor is from Liverpool. Good doctors are not just leaving the NHS they are leaving the UK.

Being a doctor/nurse is a highly mobile profession. You can go anywhere in the world and you are in demand. The benchmark is not another hospital, but options in other countries.

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