The NHS should not be above criticism.

I am sure you are right but now may be a good time to keep quiet about the failings of the NHS.

Many are working flat out in war zone conditions. This is according to an army nurse interviewed on the BBC news web site.

This famously illustrated by the late Tony Benn.

I cannot understand why we have so many highly paid regional chief executives all doing the same job within the NHS.
Surely it would make sense for this duplication to be done away with and have one central management to save on resources.

@Theowlandthepussycat1. Absolutely brilliant!

The National Health Service hasn't been National for a long time. It was divided up into regions, on the idea that competition is good! So each area does its own thing with regard to what its executives think.
We need it put back to what was intended

I tried to highlight this in another thread a few days ago Theowlandthepussycat but was basically shot down.

My DH has been waiting for surgery for 2 years now. Operations cancelled 4 times . Scans cancelled too. He has been very seriously ill and I feel being massively let down by this broken NHS for whom no one else matters unless you have CV. He is in continuous pain and basically being left to get in with it . He is only one person and I bet there are thousands more like him . Disgusting .

I find it scary too. On the subject of extremely limited dental provision there have been some horror stories in the papers. One guy was apparently in such exquisite pain from his toothache, no access to a dentist no matter where he tried (can’t you just conjure up that awful type of pain?) he froze his gums and had his 11y old son pull out the offending side tooth with a small pair of pliers!
?

And the PHE needs a proper shake up after all this. It’s not fit for purpose.

Cross party consensus is needed to reform the NHS. It’s been a political football for too long. Throwing more money at it just compounds the slow juggernaut beast.

Theowlandthepusycat
Thank you for the piece from Tony Benn. Sadly that completely sums it up. ?
My next door neighbour is a commissioning care manager and tells me that a lot of good has come out of the situation that we're in, and that includes saving a lot of money.

The NHS has not functioned well for years. I worked in it and abhorred the culture of overpaid inefficient middle management.
And it’s time it started opening up to treat sick people.
I’m not criticising the ICU staff before someone pins me to the wall but other units need to start getting their act together.
Fear is going to be the biggest killer of all.

The NHS definitely does not need a reorganisation, at least in the way these have been done before, with everyone moving the deckchairs on the Titanic at huge expense.

What it drastically needs is to clear out the dead wood, the quangos, the CQC, the many tiers of management, the commissioning/provider split and the bizarre arrangement of one section of the NHS fining another for poor performance.

Tony benn’s piece is very clever and could be applied to education !

I couldn’t fault the care my DH received in ICU either Rosalyn69 which was first class. I don’t have much good to say about the rest of his care though. Awful wards, a fair few nurses who shouldn’t be, and now just ignored and left to suffer.

Oh and Tony Benn is absolutely spot on !

My sister works in the NHS (not nursing) and I can barely believe it when she tells me how many managers, team leaders that they have on her department alone . The wages for these people alone will be eye watering.

Nhs could be reorganised with less Execs and Managers and more nurses and doctors.

I’m sure money is mismanaged and many nurses have defected to work in private hospitals and clinics or overseas.

However at this time I’m not about to dent the reputation of the brave employees on the front line who have nursed Covid patients back to health, or comforted those who have lost their lives in hospital.

They are all doing a wonderful job with the resources they have.

I have a genuine question. Our nightingale hospital lies empty.why do they not move any Covid patients there so the main hospital Can then start to function more normally? Hoping someone more knowledgeable than I am will enlighten me.

I don’t have any experience of elective surgery so won’t comment on that, as many of you have, and will have very valuable things to add to the discussion.

No one could fault the work those brave people are doing on the front line puzzler61 but I agree the whole thing needs a giant overhaul and a cull of those little managers who manage more senior managers, who manage even bigger managers........

gillybob you were not shot down. In fact many of us sympathised with you. The NHS has been ‘teorgsnised’ time and time again by government’s and their ministers and this is the result. The same has happened in education.

It’s about time doctors and teachers, were asked how things should be run and listened to, instead of people like Gove and others who haven’t a clue but think they know best.

I didn’t put that apostrophe in - my iPad is semi-literate.

I agree with gillybob. The NHS is not peopled by saints. I think that clinical responsibility has sometimes been bypassed in the need to just discharge, in particular, elderly patients back to care homes without testing. Medical consultants are highly paid and autonomous professionals who have clinical responsibility, the buck stops with them. I suspect that the medical defence union will be on the alert right now. I know this is heresy but that's my opinion.
There are also some nurses of whom I've always wondered why they entered the profession as they seem to have little interest far less empathy for their patients.

I suppose it's because the NHS is staffed by humans just like the rest of us with all our faults.

Agree totally gillybob and I’m sorry your DH is being sidelined when he needs treatment.

The NHS is famously over staffed at the top - too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Things wont change because turkeys have never voted for Christmas!

before this turns into the usual political blame game of left v right, can I point out that the the Welsh NHS has been run by Labour for decades and we’re in dire straits here as well.

In 2016, I made a Freedom of Information request to my local NHS Trust, asking what percentage of non clinical staff made up their workforce. I was in shock when the reply came back; never in a million years was I expecting to see how heavily unbalanced the numbers would be. In 2019, I made the same request and was told that, due to data protection, they were unable to provide that information. Funny that.

Yes Furret there were people who sympathised with my DH’s individual situation but wholly disagreed with the fact that no-one else seems to matter in the NHS at the moment except CV patients And why on Earth they erected/built/commissioned these Nightingale hospitals if they are not prepared to use them in order to keep our usual hospitals clean and functioning .