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Are we really going to sit by while they destroy the NHS?

Yeah I've encountered a huge number of people with similarly delusional, self-defeating views and perceptions. It's why conservative parties the world over are able to win elections despite really only representing the interests of a handful of billionaires.
What absolute patronising nonsense.
 
Yeah I've encountered a huge number of people with similarly delusional, self-defeating views and perceptions. It's why conservative parties the world over are able to win elections despite really only representing the interests of a handful of billionaires.
That and voter suppression and gerrymandering and so on
 
Primary care hospitals resemble something out of the Raj, The consultants at the top and many staff not in a position to take industrial action for better conditions due to immigration status. Many staff are sending money to family abroad relying on it to pay for education. Senior nurses tend to be white overseers.
Whether it's better pay, work conditions and now mandatory jabs it's very hard for many to speak up.
English people simply won't do the work and compounds this situation.
 
Wifes elderly aunt was in that position.She's a lifelong Tory voter and believes she would have been treated better if she was an illegal immigrant. Her words, so fuck her.

My father is in that position and is also a lifelong tory voter. Perplexingly for me, he spent most of his career working for the NHS and spent my entire childhood moaning that they didn't employ enough doctors or nurses but couldn't get enough of middle-management dipshits; somehow this was nothing to do with the tories.

Sadly, the penny is yet to drop but I'm looking forward to the latest iteration of our phone conversations on the topic when I ask how he felt being marooned on a solitary ward in an understaffed hospital for a fortnight, unable to see anyone and being attended only by staff who were too exhausted to even tell him what the weather was like outside whilst Boris and chums partied.
 
My father is in that position and is also a lifelong tory voter. Perplexingly for me, he spent most of his career working for the NHS and spent my entire childhood moaning that they didn't employ enough doctors or nurses but couldn't get enough of middle-management dipshits; somehow this was nothing to do with the tories.

Sadly, the penny is yet to drop but I'm looking forward to the latest iteration of our phone conversations on the topic when I ask how he felt being marooned on a solitary ward in an understaffed hospital for a fortnight, unable to see anyone and being attended only by staff who were too exhausted to even tell him what the weather was like outside whilst Boris and chums partied.

My Daily Express-brainwashed Tory-voting grandmother (bless her soul) got to the point of delusion where she was regaling me in her final years about how great healthcare in the UK had been prior to the NHS. This is when health provision for the poor had been so bad, she had broken her back in her late teens and been unable to afford any treatment and just had to carry on working. Which left her with a pronounced kyphotic/humped back and lifelong health problems as a result.

It's genuinely sad, but you often can't have much of a rational conversation with most conservatives when it comes to healthcare, they remain wedded to their myopic ideological stance(s) and unable or unwilling to accept anything that contradicts it in any serious way.
 
My Daily Express-brainwashed Tory-voting grandmother (bless her soul) got to the point of delusion where she was regaling me in her final years about how great healthcare in the UK had been prior to the NHS. This is when health provision for the poor had been so bad, she had broken her back in her late teens and been unable to afford any treatment and just had to carry on working. Which left her with a pronounced kyphotic/humped back and lifelong health problems as a result.

It's genuinely sad, but you often can't have much of a rational conversation with most conservatives when it comes to healthcare, they remain wedded to their myopic ideological stance(s) and unable or unwilling to accept anything that contradicts it in any serious way.

Somewhat depressingly familiar. I'm not sure if the Express was anywhere near her poison, but my grandmother who was a nurse prior to and during WW2 (that's how she met my grandfather in fact when he got blightied)...and was happy to resign from the newly formed NHS once it started getting clogged up with horrible poor people. Oh so many diseases, not even honourably garnered in war, largely just a mere factor of their poorness. Remained dismissive of the fact that is was shitey living conditions that led to poor health in the first place so was pretty much just culture shock, but I think it shaped her political opinions for the rest of her life.

Remained of the opinion that it was because the NHS was full of poor people and staffed with immigrants and patients that it didn't live up to her standards, even when the ratio changed from 5 nurses looking after 10 people to 2 nurses looking after 20 people.

Incidentally, was against my going to uni in London because it was no longer an english city or some other similar bullshit and nearly had a conniption when I said I'd moved to brixton (full of those sort, ungrateful for what they're given; you know what I mean, not the right kind of people). But was somehow entirely happy with not dying at the hands of a bunch of largely imported nurses and care who kept her alive for her last 20 years - even the brown ones; but was never entirely trustful of them not using enough bleach or carbolic soap. Was never entirely sure how anyone ever justified budgets cuts for the NHS and pay cuts for the nurses themselves. It seems to have been in the tory DNA since even before the NHS was invented... but then it's not like divide et impera is anything new under the sun on these shores.
 
To be honest I’m actually astonished that only 481 consultants have interests in private healthcare companies. I mean far, far more than that (multiple times that) do private work. Whether that’s private lists, private clinics, court work, locums. Most consultants (? most, ?many) supplement their NHS income and have a break from the insanity and chaos of the NHS doing private work. So do many, by the way, nurses, physios, OTs, chiropodists, and psychotherapists etc.
 
What Edie said. I thought it would be many more than that.

Private healthcare is becoming increasingly common as so many employers are now offering it as a benefit - not just American based companies either
 
Yeah, same, surprised it's only 481. One of my first days at my last job a locum consultant (recently left the NHS and had come back as locum) proudly got his payslip up on the department computer and boasted how much he got. Can't remember exactly, but it was over £200,000 a year.
 
This is painful to listen to, it reminds me vividly of the trouble I had getting an ambulance for my Mum when she flipped backwards down the stairs and broke her spine. So many people have had similar experiences though. It's terrifying to think it could be you dying or lying in agony needlessly while our under-resourced, profit-driven privatised ambulance services put you at the back of a 5 hour queue...

 
What Edie said. I thought it would be many more than that.

Private healthcare is becoming increasingly common as so many employers are now offering it as a benefit - not just American based companies either

As far as I can tell the private healthcare employers sometimes offer here is nothing like how it works in the US.
It's mostly profit-harvesting, with stubborn, ongoing or expensive conditions being farmed right back to the NHS.
 
A lot of private hospitals lack the expensive equipment the NHS have and set up next to a major hospital to use it. Often the private hospital will have very little in it. A small room and a better menu while you have chemo but over the road for the CT.
Also the NHS bulk booked to the tune of 400 million a month, capacity for elective admissions during the Pandemic that was barely used and largely wasted while the wards were fighting Covid.
 
It's terrifying to think it could be you dying or lying in agony needlessly while our under-resourced, profit-driven privatised ambulance services put you at the back of a 5 hour queue...

Explain that please Carvaged. Are they NHS under-resourced services or profit driven privatized services?

Ambulance services are provided by NHS Trusts, and sometimes they do also get private services to work under their area, but afaik all the calls still go through the NHS system, so no privatized ambulance service gets to place a patient anywhere in a queue, it's decided by NHS call handlers on clinical need.
 
I admitted and recovered a RALP (Robotic assisted laparoscopic prosectomy) list and then looked after and discharged them the following day.....I discovered through talking to the patients that they were private patients. I'm pissed off because I know the surgeon will be getting £120 per hour + bonus, whilst I'm on £11.50 per hour.

I sometimes do waiting list ( private surgery lists) but get paid accordingly. So feel very ripped off. Will bring this up with my boss and the union.
 
Pisses me off when have to deal with private ops that haven't gone right (infection, other complications, general care, worried questions, etc.) as seems it's common that the NHS does that rather than the private company that did the procedure.
 
A lot of private hospitals lack the expensive equipment the NHS have and set up next to a major hospital to use it. Often the private hospital will have very little in it. A small room and a better menu while you have chemo but over the road for the CT.
Also the NHS bulk booked to the tune of 400 million a month, capacity for elective admissions during the Pandemic that was barely used and largely wasted while the wards were fighting Covid.

In the UK private hospitals and healthcare companies are often little more than parasites piggybacking on existing NHS infrastructure and public investments to cream off some profit. They rarely pay to train their staff (the NHS does most of that), and they cherry-pick the easy profitable things they fancy covering. Many people thinking they're experiencing proper private healthcare because they pay £12 a month to some company they saw advertising on the TV have no clue.

Explain that please Carvaged. Are they NHS under-resourced services or profit driven privatized services?

Ambulance services are provided by NHS Trusts, and sometimes they do also get private services to work under their area, but afaik all the calls still go through the NHS system, so no privatized ambulance service gets to place a patient anywhere in a queue, it's decided by NHS call handlers on clinical need.

The provision of ambulance services are outsourced to private companies in many areas, following the 2012 Lansley reforms (though they'd started the process back in 2010 in certain regions, re-hiring staff on terrible contracts etc, causing many to quit). This means the trusts no longer have direct control - they're merely 'buying in' a service, and many are frankly a shambles. Coperforma is one particularly notorious operator, owned by the billionaire John Porter. It doesn't really matter that you're speaking to an NHS call handler if the private company providing the ambulances hasn't properly maintained their equipment, lacks ambulances, and hired too few employees in order to save money and boost their profit margin.
 
The provision of ambulance services are outsourced to private companies in many areas, following the 2012 Lansley reforms (though they'd started the process back in 2010 in certain regions, re-hiring staff on terrible contracts etc, causing many to quit). This means the trusts no longer have direct control - they're merely 'buying in' a service, and many are frankly a shambles. Coperforma is one particularly notorious operator, owned by the billionaire John Porter. It doesn't really matter that you're speaking to an NHS call handler if the private company providing the ambulances hasn't properly maintained their equipment, lacks ambulances, and hired too few employees in order to save money and boost their profit margin.

Yes, I know that, and it's not all, but some of the provision, it varies area to area massively. Yorkshire service always refused for years to outsource any for example whereas in London it's much more commonplace. But either way no private ambulance service is putting anyone at the back of a queue as you said in your post, and what I was questioning.
 
Yes, I know that, and it's not all, but some of the provision, it varies area to area massively. Yorkshire service always refused for years to outsource any for example whereas in London it's much more commonplace. But either way no private ambulance service is putting anyone at the back of a queue as you said in your post, and what I was questioning.

Ok fair enough, but that wasn't really what I was trying to convey. What I meant was you're at the back of a 5 hour queue because when the privately owned and operated service is systematically dysfunctional, underprovisioned, ill-maintained and there aren't enough crews thanks to cost cutting and mismanagement, there's not a lot your NHS call handler can do. Supply is not meeting demand, and it's unlikely to improve much given that the outsourcing model they applied when privatising the service leaves them more concerned about profit at the expense of patient needs. One is naturally in conflict with the other.
 
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Cheers for reply. As there's so much to criticise and point out as problems with some aspects of the NHS I think it's important not to mix it up with tabloid-type inaccuracies that just add to the scaremongering and general beating it gets.
 
There wouldn't be five-hour waits for ambulances if dickheads who are able to get to hospital on their own -- or who don't need to go to hospital at all -- stopped calling for them.
 
In the UK private hospitals and healthcare companies are often little more than parasites piggybacking on existing NHS infrastructure and public investments to cream off some profit. They rarely pay to train their staff (the NHS does most of that), and they cherry-pick the easy profitable things they fancy covering. Many people thinking they're experiencing proper private healthcare because they pay £12 a month to some company they saw advertising on the TV have no clue.



The provision of ambulance services are outsourced to private companies in many areas, following the 2012 Lansley reforms (though they'd started the process back in 2010 in certain regions, re-hiring staff on terrible contracts etc, causing many to quit). This means the trusts no longer have direct control - they're merely 'buying in' a service, and many are frankly a shambles. Coperforma is one particularly notorious operator, owned by the billionaire John Porter. It doesn't really matter that you're speaking to an NHS call handler if the private company providing the ambulances hasn't properly maintained their equipment, lacks ambulances, and hired too few employees in order to save money and boost their profit margin.
Wow I didn’t know that. I wonder what percent of nhs services are currently delivered via private companies.
 
Wow I didn’t know that. I wonder what percent of nhs services are currently delivered via private companies.
lots, if my experience is anything to go by. several years ago i had to go for a couple of scans and my doctor sent me to a private hospital in barnet for one and to an apparently private clinic in kentish town for the second. i was really taken aback because i thought i'd be going to the local nhs hospital
 
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