UK Thread for NHS discussion

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Why does a system being paid for by tax dollars rely on immigration?
Wouldn't lower income folks like immigrants place a larger burden on the system?

originally posted by: OtherSideOfTheCoin
a reply to: CthruU

Your problems not with your health care service its with immigration for overpopulating the system.

Utter bollocks.

The NHS relies on immigration, there is very little in the way of so-called "Health care tourism", for the most part immigration is actually a net benefit to the NHS.

Oh c'mooon noo jimmy/wee wullie- ya know i ken.

originally posted by: Bluntone22
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Why does a system being paid for by tax dollars rely on immigration?
Wouldn't lower income folks like immigrants place a larger burden on the system?

Exactly.

originally posted by: Bluntone22
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Why does a system being paid for by tax dollars rely on immigration?
Wouldn't lower income folks like immigrants place a larger burden on the system?

Not really the issue again is with staffing, the NHS has a massive reliance of foreign staff that is where the biggest benefit comes from. Now yes immigration will cost the NHS but that cost is pretty minimal in comparison to other factors such as chaining in technology, new heath trends, older population and so on yet the biggest advantage is recruitment.

Sounds like about the same amount of time there to see a specialist as we have here. Even seeing my regular doctor means waiting two weeks, but we have walk in clinics and emergency rooms. I use the walk in clinic more than my regular doctor, usually I wait till I abosoutely have to go before going to see a doctor, the walk in clinic works fine, I rarely see my GP. I went one time this spring to the regular doctor, it was three years since I met with the last one before that.

I am not going to take statins, I saw what they did to the thinking of friends. I am not going to take any medicine long term, I have had bad side effects with long term meds. I will change my diet using research to help out. Although, I have tested on myself and got negative side effects adjusting food chemistry, but researched why and have used alternate types of foods.

I do have a doctor who will help with prescribing some blood work so I can identify what is causing the side effects, I hit the jackpot, he does not seem to be pushing meds, I told him I would rather do things the right way.

originally posted by: OtherSideOfTheCoin
The NHS relies on immigration, there is very little in the way of so-called "Health care tourism", for the most part immigration is actually a net benefit to the NHS.

While the NHS clearly relies on non-Britons to fill some posts, you could argue that many immigrants rely on the NHS for a livelihood. For the professions you’ll find that people are pretty mobile and the NHS is a good employer, so (for example) attracts nurses from overseas, just as much as British nurses get jobs elsewhere overseas.

The problem with the NHS has been poor planning to ensure the right numbers of staff are available to be employed, specifically staff in the professions. We have a shortage of GPs, but too many paediatricians and gynaecologists.

Healthcare tourism does cost the NHS, but the scale is pretty much unknown. My American sister-in-law has been to a UK A&E twice in visits to the UK; once when she needed stiches, and another time when her daughter had bashed her head and was concussed. Despite saying, she was American AND giving her address in America she was never asked to pay anything, give insurance or fill a form. To add, as an American she was impressed by the care she got in the NHS and not just because it was free!

originally posted by: OtherSideOfTheCoin

More people need to take responsibility for their own health, the NHS I believe does too much for example bariatric surgery or cosmetic surgery or idiots who book a appointment with the GP because they have a cold, occasional headache, "my leg hurts when I do this...it never used to". I also think that you should receive a on the spot fine if you fail to attend a GP or hospital appointment without give notice or having reasonable grounds for doing so, the money from this should go directly into the NHS just like costs for prescriptions and other odd bits we pay for.

Fridays and Saturdays the paramedics and A & E are inundated with young p

aralitic drunks. Instead of the NHS treating them they should be arrested and have to

pay a fine before being released for wasted police time.

The biggest problem though is staff.
Doctors are smart people, they are the kids at at school who got the good grades, they then head of to uni for at least 5 years and walk out with a job that starting out pays you about £25,000 and really its going to take you about 5 or 6 years before your making some decent money (around 40-50k). Its a job that involves long hours, night shifts, lots of stress, and doing some rather unpleasant jobs so why not just take the easy route and instead of studding medicine go do law or economics, pays better, better conditions and just less hassle over all.
Nursing is the same, a band 5 nurse at the top of the pay scale is on about £30k, now that's a 3-4 year degree program, lots of stress, lots of long unsocial hours doing again some rather unpleasant things. Why not become a police officer where you're looking at 38k or a teacher where upper pay levels are about 40k. Want a real kick in the teeth get this, I am an experienced nurse at the top of my banding, my mate recently got a job in the same NHS trust working in the IT department looking after a single system he gets about 8k more than me a year.

So really then why the # would anyone want to take a job like medicine or nursing where you get crap pay compared to other comparable professions, more stress, less benefits and deal with all the negatives that go with working in the NHS....I

And some don't even get basic pay.....my personal bugbear......

My grandaughter is due to graduate soon as a paramedic and she has for two

plus years worked 12 hour shifts three or four days a week doing the actual

work as they are mentored but have to do the actual work, as well as

dissertations and exams...... not even a nominal salary or travelling expenses.

Honestly the first thing that they could do to fix the NHS is take a few billion they are spending on foreign aid, nukes, or whatever the newest pointless IT system is and use it to pay their staff a fair wage. Its crazy to think that the guy who is operating the ventilator that is keeping your son alive is probably earning less than his geography teacher or the IT tech.

Didn't some IT company make millions on an unworkable computer system

that turned out 'not fit for purpose'??

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Being a nurse don't you think most of the foreign staff shirk their responsibilities?
e.g when doing OBs they can't read or write properly so they get the other nurses/health care's off what they are doing to help?
Also most of the agency staff never take any responsibility as they are only on the ward for the night and getting paid twice as much as the salaried staff.

a reply to: johnb

In part the NHS is a victim of behind the seen's wrangling and outsourcing and by REAL TERM's cut's by economic right wing element's both the Conservatives and the NEW LABOUR (which has thankfully been brought down by old Labour).

The medical professional's were once very well paid but thank's to successive cut's, under inflation rises and our doctors having better chance of well paying work abroad we have lost many of our top specialists, many of our finest surgeon's and many of our GP's whom have chosen to migrate abroad.

Since the Blair Years the NHS has been neglected, broken up and then butchered to allow private competition to gain a foothold through unfair hobbling of the NHS itself and then under the Condem's it has been subjected to AE closures, Staff moral at it's lowest ever level's and downright utter contempt and lies by the Conservatives whom have claimed they are now paying the NHS more than ever before but refusing to acknowledge that there argument has not factored in Inflation or real world money devaluation so in affect it is at one of it's real world worse level's of funding as a result and the guy responsible almost universally despised by NHS staff is now vying to run the government and become the un-elected (by the people) prime minister.

Back in the past the NHS was not as good as it should have been, dentists used to be paid by filling's leading to many quack's making unnecessary work on people's teeth and worse.

But the NHS has never been in a worse place.

Now (Conservatives again) to spice thing's up for the private market and make a nice little money spinner for the NHS itself they have brought in PRESUMED Consent on ORGAN DONATION.

How does this work, you go in and a doctor then declares you are likely (never definite) to die and it would not be COST EFFECTIVE to save your life BUT your organ's are healthy, guess what the NHS will then sell excess healthy organ's to the private sector including for export.

I could go on and on and on but let's just say something stink's from the top to the bottom and that smell is coming from the Tory's and filtering down rotting parts of society as it goes.

A tangentially related question: Does the UK have anything in the way of a pharmaceutical industry? Do you have large companies manufacturing drugs, doing research to develop new drugs, looking for cures, etc.?

a reply to: VictorVonDoom

We used to, even had vast government shares in some of them before they got sold off - (snapped up by the same guy's and gal's making the decision to sell them - to themselves) - by the Tory's.

We used to have major NHS contract's with some of the biggest pharmaceutical and chemical company's made at government level by government ministers and because the private medical sector in the UK was small that gave the NHS government representative minister immense bargaining power allowing reasonable deal's to be made with these company's whom often benefited in some way or other beyond this from there dealing's and account's in the UK.

Here is a list of Pharmaceutical company's in the UK, remember corporations will have company's in many country's and while a company may be owned by a corporation based in another nation that company is itself often in the country were it is trading.
en.wikipedia.org...

Actually the UK has a very long history of Pharmaceutical's though today you will think of the mega corporations.

We still today make and export a Lot of medicine, UK made medicine is actually among the best due to high quality standard's regulating production which are above many other nations including the US though I believe Canada shared our quality levels in there production as does Australia and New Zealand while products made for example in India are often far below that level of quality.

a reply to: VictorVonDoom

Yes, yes, yes, and then some.

Some of the largest pharmaceutical companies on the planet hail from the UK.

Take GlaxoSmithKline or AstraZeneca for instance, respectively the world's 5th and 6th largest pharmaceutical companies, measured by 2009 market share.

As to research, 1 in 5 of the world's biggest-selling prescription drugs was developed in the UK.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: CthruU

British as we all know tried to concour the world - so in reality all threads are uk threads after all we're all descendants of british tyranny and occupation from way back.

That’s possibly one of the most idiotic things I’ve read on this site, and that’s really saying something.

a reply to: UKWO1Phot

I can only speak from my own experience but....

Being a nurse don't you think most of the foreign staff shirk their responsibilities?

Honestly its almost the opposite, particularly with the European's most of whom are either Irish or eastern European for the most part they do their job just as well as the rest of us. For every foreign nurse who doesn't pull their wait am sure you would have no problem finding a few British nurses who do the same.

when doing OBs they can't read or write properly so they get the other nurses/health care's off what they are doing to help?

Again I can only speak from my experience but I have never really had this problem, I have seen nurses with significant communication problems it does happen some of them where foreign but for the most part its not a problem. I do think however that in the private sector this is a issue where they employ quite a lot more foreign staff. For example my other half has had a job in a care home where she has been sitting in a staff room and everyone stated speaking Filipino. So it does happen but its not a huge problem I have seen in the NHS.

Also most of the agency staff never take any responsibility as they are only on the ward for the night and getting paid twice as much as the salaried staff.

That is another massive problem but its got nothing to do with foreign staff. I know one guy who left a ward I worked on to go on agency only to come back the next week and tell us all how he was getting paid three times as much for the shift. As you can imagine he wasn't very popular.

Agencies and the NHS is an entirely different problem.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Why does a system being paid for by tax dollars rely on immigration? Wouldn't lower income folks like immigrants place a larger burden on the system?

We don’t use the petro dollar in the U.K. we use the pound. Many of the immigrants are doctors and such, so not necessarily low income.

Like most other countries we only have a problem with illegal immigrants and human trafficking and the gangs that enable this. The government definitely needs to do more about this rather than pretending it’s not that big an issue.

On the other hand things like the NHS and the benefits system are what attract a fair amount of immigrants to the U.K. in the first place.

The real problem in the U.K. and most other countries though, is full on in your face corruption all the way to the top.

originally posted by: VictorVonDoom
A tangentially related question: Does the UK have anything in the way of a pharmaceutical industry? Do you have large companies manufacturing drugs, doing research to develop new drugs, looking for cures, etc.?

Prior to Brexit the UK was home to the European Medicines agency which is moving to Amsterdam, they were basically giving out all the big European research grants and funding. Its part of the Brexit problem is that this is going to take significant resources out of pharmaceuticals.

We most definitely do have a massive drugs manufacturing industry with lots of research being done in that field however I don't think its quite the same as it is in America where a drug rep turns up take the doc out for a nice dinner and the next day all of a sudden that doctor is now prescribing it to every patient.

What can and cannot be prescribed isn't decided really be a doctor, our trust for example has this huge database of the drugs we keep and thats what you have to work with if you want to say swap brands then there is loads of clinical governance to go through before you can change the brand. If you want to prescribe something outside of that database again its lots of red-tape. So their influence isn't quite the same. Its not like a drug rep can take a doctor out on their yacht and next week everyone has switched brands, its lots of very boring tedious meetings and in the end it quite simply usually comes down to what brand is cheeper for the trust not who is giving this doctor or that executive more money.

I do spend time with reps, I have sat in rooms where a rep tells us about this wonderful new machine they have for us only for the medical staff in the room to rip it to bits.

What you do get quite a bit of is doctors working with drug companies to help with trials, so for instance our trust was part of a study looking at using combine inhalers rather than a patient being on 2 or 3 individuals inhalers. I was involved in looking at some aspects of this but we were basically interested in two things, would this new inhaler lead to better patient outcome and would it be more cost effective for the trust. The study was done, finished, published and the answer to both questions was basically yes so after that we switch it up. Benefit for the drug company is that they now have a real world study that proves that their product is better than their competitors, benefit for the trust is that we have a cheaper way of delivering the treatment and its easier for the patient because now they have one inhaler rather than 3. Everyone wins and thats honestly how it goes for the most part in the UK we are very strict about anything involved with drugs.

a reply to: LABTECH767

What utter bollocks.
Having seen the donor recipient register at work I can categorically state you are talking #e.
Wind your neck in and make comments based on fact not fiction.
That is all.

a reply to: LABTECH767

I agree with some of what you're saying but your way off on that stuff about organ donation....

That is just simply not true.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

I don't often rant but nice one Othersideofthe coin.

I've written a thank you letter to the Donor Family.

That tw8t is clueless.

Thanks for the info, guys.