NHS a National Treasure?

NHS has it problems.

But it could be far far far worse....


We could live in America

reply to post by iRoyalty


The problem with 111 is that it took over from a service where trained nurses, registered nurses manned the phone and now the phones are manned by untrained personnel, They may have a few weeks training but bear in mind nurses have trained for a minimum of 3 years and often for many years beyond this as many will also be midwives or specialise in ICU or something else.

The NHS is being down graded where by nursing care assistants [ with no on minimal education / training] are replacing registered nurses and they call it ' skill mix'.

The NHS is also being sold left right and centre - it is being segmented and sold to companies like virgin , some of them still use NHS branding as their logo but in actual fact they are small for profit companies - limiting the service and taking profit for the directors straight from the tax payer,

What is happening in the NHS right now is a disgrace,

reply to post by dam00


It is not free, I pay many hundreds of pounds every month into national insurance and then many hundreds more in tax.

It is free for people who do not pay tax ..

HelenConway
reply to post by iRoyalty

 

The problem with 111 is that it took over from a service where trained nurses, registered nurses manned the phone and now the phones are manned by untrained personnel, They may have a few weeks training but bear in mind nurses have trained for a minimum of 3 years and often for many years beyond this as many will also be midwives or specialise in ICU or something else.

That's not true, the 0845 number was always manned by 'Health Advisors' which are not health proffesionals. The only major change has been the management build and the systems we use. We still have nurses that advise us and that we can pass calls to if we feel like it is out of our mandate, same as the 0845. Nationally we deal with thousands of calls a day, to have nurses answering every call would need the services of every nurse in the country.

The NHS is also being sold left right and centre - it is being segmented and sold to companies like virgin , some of them still use NHS branding as their logo but in actual fact they are small for profit companies - limiting the service and taking profit for the directors straight from the tax payer,

What is happening in the NHS right now is a disgrace,

This is true though though and I hate what is happening, we're slowly being dismantled and sold to the highest bidder, at the end of the day, it's the average Joe who will suffer for it.

reply to post by iRoyalty


Actually that is incorrect .. NHS direct in its heyday was nurse led and nurses answering the phone - the call might have been forwarded to the nurse by a call assistant. However - it was more up skilled and better funded then the 111 system.

Why do you think they got rid of it ?? Because 111 was far far cheaper - bearing in mind that about 80% of the business costs were / are staff [ in this arena].

Actually prior to the Labour govt in the mid / late 90s there was no telephone advice system .. so it is relatively new anyway.

reply to post by HelenConway


I don't know if you've read my previous comments but I have worked for NHS Direct for sometime now.. If 0845 didn't have non-healthcare professionals answering the calls then what the hell were half my work colleges doing?? We've got health advisors that have been working for the service and answering calls for the past 8 years and beyond!

Perhaps the very first build of NHS Direct was initially nurses, but they have had non-healthcare professionals handling the calls for at least 8 years now.

reply to post by iRoyalty


Yes that is right it was initially nurses - on a decent grade , so senior nurses, then it changed. Then it changed again.

The down grade started several years ago - I know you are right about that,

I am not trying to demean your job - I am sure you are very hardworking and good at what you do.

My bigger point really was that the NHS is being broken down and then being sold [ in a very sly manner ], once sold the services are reduced.

Plus they are down grading staff and replacing nurses with untrained nurses hell they are even replacing some drs services with nurses !!

This is not good.

HelenConway
reply to post by iRoyalty

 

Yes that is right it was initially nurses - on a decent grade , so senior nurses, then it changed. Then it changed again.

The down grade started several years ago - I know you are right about that,

These changed were through increasing popularity though, there's simply not enough nurses any more. The senior nurses are there to advise now and the other nurses are for escalation calls and home management advise, it would be quite impossible to have nurses take all our jobs with the volumes we get compared to the beginning. Like any business that grows, you need helpers for the professionals!

My bigger point really was that the NHS is being broken down and then being sold [ in a very sly manner ], once sold the services are reduced.

Plus they are down grading staff and replacing nurses with untrained nurses hell they are even replacing some drs services with nurses !!

This is not good.

I will agree with you here, this is because of the need for a quick expansion and too little funding to back it up. There is also an inherent lack of HC professionals these days. I think if I were to be voted into power tomorrow, one of the first things I would do is find a way to offer a discount to people looking to start degrees in medicine, only to be paid back if they do not finish the degree! An influx of professionals would save us I think.

The National Health Service is indeed a "National Treasure". It is a fantastic public service which has millions of amazing employees who save people's lives day-in-day-out. Despite the recent negative press of some hospitals the public seem to forgot the vast majority of the NHS is exemplary. Due to government cuts, like every public service the NHS is suffering and until the Health Secretary pulls his fingers out of his ears there will be less nurses and there will be even longer waiting times in A&E.

I would argue the UK has the best healthcare in the world.

reply to post by Shuftystick


I support a lot of what you say, corporate 'targets' are poorly understood in industry let alone the public sector. It is no surprise to me that NHS Management has lost sight of what it is supposed to be delivering as this has been the case in industry for a while.

A lot of this can be traced back to an 80s fad called the Deming Cycle, or Plan, Do, Check, Act. It simply does not work in the wrong hands, you need to be skilled at it to make it drive a business or organisation forward. What worries me even more is it has just been adopted by the Health and Safety Executive, which in my opinion is a complete disaster.

I'll state for the record now, the next few years will see a significant rise in workplace accidents, and ironically this will come at a time when the NHS is on its knees.

The British Government need to wake up and smell the antiseptic.

enjoy it while it lasts....it's already in private/capitalist hands... eventually, after the fact, the nurses and doctors will understand what went on behind their backs while they slept....


Trust me on this...kiss your pension and early retirement bye bye.

The NHS is finished...

The problems the NHS faces are simply down to mismanagement on a grand scale, and an opportunity for people to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. The rot really started to set in when, like many other institutions, it was restructured to operate as a business. You just cannot operate such a service as the NHS as a business!
Get rid of several layers of the useless management and replace them with medical professionals, who are qualified to run the hospitals and make decisions based on medical needs, NOT financial needs and targets and we might start improving things a bit.
My sister works in the NHS caring for sectioned patients and sees the problems first hand. When short staffed, they usually get lumbered with agency staff. Not only is this damned expensive but those agency staff don't know the patients, don't know the routines around them and thus have to be given minor tasks and basically told to keep out of the way of the others. In short, they are there simply to make up the numbers to maintain targets for staffing, while at the same time the regulars are denied overtime to cover. The regular staff are poorly paid, even the ridiculous 1.1% increase they were expecting last year was withdrawn, while at the same time senior "management" get bonuses, golden parachute payoffs and all the benefits and executive perks.

I could go on, but I am sure anyone who has followed the demise of the NHS over the years has seen and heard it all before. I am still convinced that all main parties are being lobbied to privatize even more of it and to push us towards more of an insurance driven system, despite what the oily politicians may say.

reply to post by Britguy


Nail on the head!

I would have once considered myself a socialist, these days I'm closer to the fence. However saying that I believe that only a leader with some socialist intent is all that can save the NHS now. Capitalism has gone too far and we need to back track for a while, bring some VITAL services back into Government and tax payers control.

The NHS could be a lot better with more local control but at the same time using the buying power of the whole, i seem to remember something that 10's of millions could be saved just having one central contract for A4 paper as at the moment each gp's surgery/hospital etc orders its own from different suppliers and multiply that out over everything the NHS does it would save billions as it would cut down on non medical staff needed and allow loads of money to be pushed back in to where its needed.

The other thing that would improve things is for the government to get its head out of micromanaging the NHS so theres less need for KPI's etc that do nothing but create swathes of people shifting paper around and encourage a hit the target at all costs even if the actual service will suffer.

reply to post by Maxatoria

Oh no, not the dreaded KPI's, you will be dragging Pacestter and Lean into the NHS Efficiency in Savings picture next.
Close a hospital and save £86m a year, close a hundred hospitals and save £8.6Bn a year, wow, let's close another hundred and save over £17Bn then?
Yes, but...
Well that's the kind of mentality pervading Public Sector NHS management and why the NHS is as badly run as the likes of the HSE, HMRC, The Courts System, CPS, The Police "services"and all the rest.
It will truly take a Road to Damascus moment to turn the NHS monolith around.

The only way of getting off the ambulance trolley or gurney is if you require resuscitation or have a pure life threatening condition.

This line OP, really caught my eye, tells me there is no chance you have ever worked in a busy A&E department. I have.

Let me tell you something, in my experience i would say about 75% of the stuff I saw come through the doors to A&E was either self in flitted either by drink, drugs, self harm or stupidity or it was stuff that could have been dealt with by a GP. I once had to tell a man that the "lump" was actually his testicle and tell a young woman that A&E was not the place to come for if you dont have any plasters for that cut on your figurine.

That's what takes up the beds, that why you see ambulances queuing up its because of the pressure that the public are putting on A&E departments. The 4 hour target in the unit i worked in was met at least 95% of the time, the only time i saw ambulances queuing up was on a Friday night when we had a massive RTA with multiple poloytrama's. It happens.

If your working in a major trauma center your job is to patch em up and kick em out, I dont care very much for how "sick" you are when i have just spent 2 hours trying to resuscitate a 4 year old kid with mum and dad watching. I don't care how much you want to curse at me, I was threatened and beaten working in that place, put under the most unbelievable stress and you say that me and my colleges are uncareing and most of us are unfit to work.

How dare you!

How can you presume to sit about and tell us all that we are awful at our jobs when you dont seem to have any idea about how the system works or the demands of the jobs.

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin

If your working in a major trauma center your job is to patch em up and kick em out, I dont care very much for how "sick" you are when i have just spent 2 hours trying to resuscitate a 4 year old kid with mum and dad watching. I don't care how much you want to curse at me, I was threatened and beaten working in that place, put under the most unbelievable stress and you say that me and my colleges are uncareing and most of us are unfit to work.

How dare you!

Well said OSOTC

Cody

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin

Right of reply...

Read the papers, go along to a court, civil or criminal, dealing with a NHS Trust liability case, submit a Freedom of Information request to your own Trust and ask how many times they have settled out of court to buy silence.
Get a life chum, I dare to say what I say because that is the reality of today's NHS.
Leaving aside the obvious good works that I have praised casualty staff for, whether as a relative of a patient or a patient please take a step back from your overstressed role, with which I agree 101%, you obviously are, and examine the facts.
Non primary care is poor, overworked payroll staff are making at best mistakes at worst, as has been proven unfortunately committing criminal acts or omissions - when it's been proven in open court more than once - that is why I dare, along with having seen it first hand.
So, please don't be so insistent when you intimate that I don't know what I am talking about.
Some of your colleagues across the NHS have been convicted of murder, be they a GP like Shipman, or one of the nursing profession staff that have been proved to have killed or caused to be killed their patients.
The media in general as well as politicians from all parties have in fact compared the poor NHS patient "care" to that offered in 3rd world countries.
Yes nurses work overlong shifts, but so do many other public sector workers such as Police, who tend to have to babysit arrested persons in casualty while waiting for someone to have attention for petty ailments that could be better dealt with by their GP if they didn't have to wait 2 flipping weeks for an appointment!
Those cops having to sit in your overstretched casualty department should be out protecting society not sat on their rear looking at a clock saying our waiting time is currently 4hrs.
I agree with those that say keep the bean counters and politicians out of the equation. I would pay nurses on the hospital payroll more than the meagre fraction of salary an agency nurse doing the same job earns.
I would also suggest you take a broader look at the NHS and those Trusts being compulsory transferred to other Trust control before firing off..

reply to post by Shuftystick

The media in general as well as politicians from all parties have in fact compared the poor NHS patient "care" to that offered in 3rd world countries

Have you been to the hospital in Soweto ?

Have you been to Gaza ?

Do you have any idea what a third world hospital looks like or what they deal with ?

I think not

Please feel free to seek treatment at them.

Then come back and complain about the NHS

Cody