Topic: "Sell-Off" - The Abolition of Your NHS

[WhereAngelsPlay]

On the Flu pandemic stuff, a bit of googling gives you a few policies, but for the crucial decisions they refer on to existing policies, and local Trust policies (The local policies tend to hidden on trust intranets).

For the deaths, a bit of googling gives you individual payout stories. The Daily Mail did an article here on some of it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3102865/NHS-pays-100MILLION-compensation-families-patients-died-hospital-medics-blunders.html

He asks for links and you tell him to google and post a story from the Dailyfail.

Are you willing to concede that people who drink & smoke already pay the equivalent of a plastic bag tax ?

[So… Howard Philips]

He asks for links and you tell him to google and post a story from the Dailyfail.

Are you willing to concede that people who drink & smoke already pay the equivalent of a plastic bag tax ?

And typical of the DM to have another of their NHS hatchet jobs on line.

Amazing the way they never feature botched private healthcare operations etc. I wonder why?

[WhereAngelsPlay]

And typical of the DM to have another of their NHS hatchet jobs on line.

Amazing the way they never feature botched private healthcare operations etc. I wonder why?

I am still trying to work out why Mick even brought it up.

[drmick]

I clearly have offended WhereAngelsPlay, and for that I am sorry.

But due to the nature of his replies I have added him to my block list- I can no longer read his posts.

[Jiminy Cricket]

In my late 20's I just brushed off an illness that almost killed me, I ended up needing open heart surgery. Couple of years ago I found a lump in my neck, my wife was all "don't go the doctors, its just a lump".

I don't know what to say to that.

After weeks of worry I went, got told it was just a cyst but got sent for a precautionary scan, where they found odd lumps in my thyroid. On my birthday I got a letter saying only one in eight who get this letter will have cancer and was put on the two week cancer pathway. Luckily the biopsies came back negative, but that shows just how easily things can go undetected.

Good for you. I'm glad that it all worked out well.

[Medellin]

BBC News - 'Misery' for A&E patients facing record-long waits
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51046616

A&E patients turned away!

"some hospitals even had to introduce emergency protocols and turn away walk-in patients so they could focus on patients brought in by ambulances.

There were more than 120 cases of this happening last month - with some hospitals instigating the measure, known as an A&E divert, multiple times."

Unbelievable.

[kopite77]

BBC News - 'Misery' for A&E patients facing record-long waits
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51046616

A&E patients turned away!

"some hospitals even had to introduce emergency protocols and turn away walk-in patients so they could focus on patients brought in by ambulances.

There were more than 120 cases of this happening last month - with some hospitals instigating the measure, known as an A&E divert, multiple times."

Unbelievable.

It’s fucking amazing this news was quietly slipped out on the day all the Harry and Meghan shit hit the headlines isn’t it?! Talk about a good day to bury bad news!

[Mutton Geoff]

i suppose this might be nationwide but in the cinema amongst the adverts is a nice little trailer what you could do rather than go to the GP such as self help, ask a pharmacist or go online all worthy in some cases but the wording of this trailer might put off people who really should go to the GP if they can get an appointment!
Also to agree with tepid charging is a risky road to go down, many kids teeth are rotten since dentists are no longer on the NHS, people dont bother getting medicine if they can’t afford the prescription charge something that is abolished in other parts of the uk
The only time i think charging might be ok is some sort of fine for missed appointments without letting the surgery know

[Welshred]

Dental care for children is free in this country so that's not an excuse for kids having rotten teeth.

[Mutton Geoff]

Dental care for children is free in this country so that's not an excuse for kids having rotten teeth.

i thought it depended if you can find an nhs dentist ? Although could be wrong its decades since my daughters were kids

[rob1966]

i thought it depended if you can find an nhs dentist ? Although could be wrong its decades since my daughters were kids

IMO it is poor parenting. While we had no issue finding an NHS dentist, there are plenty near us and the private one she used to go to changed to full NHS years ago, every time our two go for a 6 month checkup they are in for minutes as they never need anything doing anyway. The wife is shit hot on making them clean their teeth properly and since they were babies they were given water to drink and not sugary drinks, they aren't given loads of sweets, we don't feed them fast foods from McNasty's, KFC etc.

[losCHUNK]

I spent 12+ months trying to find an NHS dentist taking on before going private :/

You're right though, no kid should have teeth rotting out their face.

[BlackandWhitePaul]

IMO it is poor parenting. While we had no issue finding an NHS dentist, there are plenty near us and the private one she used to go to changed to full NHS years ago, every time our two go for a 6 month checkup they are in for minutes as they never need anything doing anyway. The wife is shit hot on making them clean their teeth properly and since they were babies they were given water to drink and not sugary drinks, they aren't given loads of sweets, we don't feed them fast foods from McNasty's, KFC etc.

Excellent stuff Rob.

[Red-Soldier]

Their closing down my local A and E

[Mutton Geoff]

so if the waiting times are poor the answer is to remove the waiting times policy so the govt doesn't get embarrassed , so lets say if a lot of schools struggle to provide a decent education because of the cuts, will they get rid of ofsted ?

[rob1966]

Currently having a lot of experience with the NHS and it is when you really need it you realise just how brilliant it is and how we will be fucked when its gone. My wife went in day before new year with pain in her chest, NYE she was checked over, had bllods etc, she's had a CT scan, ultrasound, everything looks OK, she's got an xray and Echo cardiogram tomorrow and as she has a cyst on an ovary so she is seeing the cancer exclusion clinic on Tuesday. Try getting all that in under 3 weeks if you cannot afford insurance.

[idontknow]

Currently having a lot of experience with the NHS and it is when you really need it you realise just how brilliant it is and how we will be fucked when its gone. My wife went in day before new year with pain in her chest, NYE she was checked over, had bllods etc, she's had a CT scan, ultrasound, everything looks OK, she's got an xray and Echo cardiogram tomorrow and as she has a cyst on an ovary so she is seeing the cancer exclusion clinic on Tuesday. Try getting all that in under 3 weeks if you cannot afford insurance.

Hope she is alright
(tomorrow, well, football's not everything  )
hope you are ok too

[Mutton Geoff]

Currently having a lot of experience with the NHS and it is when you really need it you realise just how brilliant it is and how we will be fucked when its gone. My wife went in day before new year with pain in her chest, NYE she was checked over, had bllods etc, she's had a CT scan, ultrasound, everything looks OK, she's got an xray and Echo cardiogram tomorrow and as she has a cyst on an ovary so she is seeing the cancer exclusion clinic on Tuesday. Try getting all that in under 3 weeks if you cannot afford insurance.

Hope it works out ok Rob best wishes to both of you

[thejbs]

Cannot believe how fucked we are in NI. I was told yesterday that the waiting list for a PRIVATE neurology appointment is 5-6 months. That’s a £300 consultation. Pre-covid, private waiting times here were usually a week or two.

I had an MRI that showed intracranial hypertension. It is suspected of causing my crippling headaches and my sudden hearing loss, but I was told on the NHS that it could be ‘months or a year’ to get seen about it. Meanwhile, my hearing will likely continue to degrade.

The system is broken.

[oldfordie]

Cannot believe how fucked we are in NI. I was told yesterday that the waiting list for a PRIVATE neurology appointment is 5-6 months. That’s a £300 consultation. Pre-covid, private waiting times here were usually a week or two.

I had an MRI that showed intracranial hypertension. It is suspected of causing my crippling headaches and my sudden hearing loss, but I was told on the NHS that it could be ‘months or a year’ to get seen about it. Meanwhile, my hearing will likely continue to degrade.

The system is broken.

It's obscene.
Could go online a book a doctors appointment with ease in the past, it got harder before the Pandemic, whole efficient system has been scrapped. have to phone up on the day and told were booked up you will have to go the hospital if you feel really bad.

[thejbs]

I have to wait 2 weeks to get a phone call from my GP just to get a referral for my private appointment. The private hospital won’t let me book without it (that’s never happened before). The two week wait will mean a longer wait for he private appointment.

Used to be that a gp would give a referral letter the same day.

[Jiminy Cricket]

Cannot believe how fucked we are in NI. I was told yesterday that the waiting list for a PRIVATE neurology appointment is 5-6 months. That’s a £300 consultation. Pre-covid, private waiting times here were usually a week or two.

I had an MRI that showed intracranial hypertension. It is suspected of causing my crippling headaches and my sudden hearing loss, but I was told on the NHS that it could be ‘months or a year’ to get seen about it. Meanwhile, my hearing will likely continue to degrade.

The system is broken.

Is it possible to go private on The Continent somewhere? I know - even more expense.

[spen71]

Cannot believe how fucked we are in NI. I was told yesterday that the waiting list for a PRIVATE neurology appointment is 5-6 months. That’s a £300 consultation. Pre-covid, private waiting times here were usually a week or two.

I had an MRI that showed intracranial hypertension. It is suspected of causing my crippling headaches and my sudden hearing loss, but I was told on the NHS that it could be ‘months or a year’ to get seen about it. Meanwhile, my hearing will likely continue to degrade.

The system is broken.

I had intercranial hypertension as a teenager.    Bloody horrible,  luckily lumbar punctures and steroids got rid it of it.    Get the occasional headache for a few days and that is bad enough

[Sheer Magnetism]

Full article at the link:

Want to see an NHS doctor? Prepare to cough up your data first

To get a doctor’s appointment in the U.K. these days, you have to entrust more of your data to private companies — and there’s not a great deal you can do about it.

In part due to growing pressure from the government to meet a two-week limit for patient appointments, family doctors — or general practitioners (GPs) as they’re known in the U.K. — are turning to third-party software to facilitate appointments and prioritize cases based on urgency, a shift that has left patients with no option but to give private companies access to their personal data.

While the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was once a bastion of state-funded care, where an individual’s economic disposition had little bearing on their access to medical services, today it’s a somewhat different matter — a victim of chronic underfunding and understaffing with record waiting times for routine hospital treatments and working conditions that have led to doctors, nurses and other clinicians striking en masse.

With the government pushing for further privatization, corporations have been circling for pieces of the billion-dollar health pie. The NHS has struck controversial data-sharing deals with the likes of Google’s DeepMind, while a slew of U.S. tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Palantir were awarded contracts as part of the NHS’s COVID-19 datastore project four years ago.

At the same time, primary care has also been infiltrated, where for many it’s now impossible to get so much as a simple checkup at the local clinic without having to divulge personal information to private companies.

There is no singular body that tracks which GP clinics are using which software, as this type of data is not centralized in that way — NHS England told TechCrunch that because it is made up of different organizations, we would need to make individual requests to individual GP clinics or local integrated care boards (ICBs) that make up the NHS throughout the U.K. However, in our research, we found a growing number of clinics are using private companies to triage primary care appointments — with no way around it.

One such company is Klinik, which says it’s now live across 300 NHS GP clinics in the U.K., while Econsult says it’s used by 40%. And Patchs Health said it “supports over 10 million patients across the NHS.”

IT dependency in the NHS, as with many other sectors today, is becoming the norm. By way of example, a system used by two-in-five GP clinics to manage prescriptions, patients records, and appointments went down last year, leading to significant disruption in their operations — and this wasn’t an isolated incident, with local healthcare media taken to tracking the problem.

But while cozying up to the private technology sector is nothing new, what is new is the growing inability to get the most basic form of NHS healthcare without giving private companies access to your personal information. And if you don’t like it — tough.

[macca007]

To be honest almost all software systems in the NHS will be done by a private company and since we moved away from paper that's how it has been. And it has helped. Quicker referrals, quicker results, less things getting lost in the post when going back to GP etc.

There are problems with private care coming out the NHS budget, but systems aren't it.

For instance, with suspected testicular cancer they will get done quicker than someone who has a suspected cyst and rightfully.

So don't particularly agree with the point of a lot of that