NHS again

Mishap I'm sorry your DH has needed been poorly and needed intensive treatment but glad that's it was there for him and its worked. I still feel we are very lucky to have our NHS. Any super large organisation has its problems but on the whole all of us can get treatment pretty much at the time we need it. I still feel the NHS is abused on a large scale by the public and the media have a lot to answer for in destroying its once excellent reputation. Our doctors, nurses, para medical and ancillary staff need our support and encouragement to carry on providing us with care free at the point of delivery. A Happy New Year to them all.

Couldn't agree more, teetime! The treatment I have had over the past year has been exceptional.

Exactly, Mishap. If my children or grandchildren went to Spain or Denmark, there is no way I could go with them because of all the drugs I have now since my aortic dissection. My husband had been diabetic, on insulin since he was 11. Fortunately that was after the NHS came into being, as his parents would not have been able to afford the drugs or equipment.

We really do not want to go back to those days. In fact I think that asthma sufferers should also get drugs free.
If an insurance backed system came in now, many of us would not be insurable.

And I am also a cancer survivor (fingers always crossed when I write that) - another reason to be thankful.

I am sitting here hoping that my next operation won't be cancelled again, but completely understand why it might happen in an overstretched service. (Would still be sad....)

Good post Teetime.

I think I have posted about this before, so at the risk of repeating myself. My DH was diagnosed with cancer this year. The treatment and support from the NHS has been second to none. He (we) have been treated with kindness and compassion throughout 49 hospital appointments, including bone scan, pelvis scan, MRI scan, 37 bouts of radiotherapy etc. For his radiotherapy we were sent to a private hospital as it was nearer for us to visit each day. Apparently a percentage of NHS patients are taken by private hospitals for things such as radiotherapy as the NHS hospitals are so overloaded. We ere treated exactly the same as the private patients. Strangely, the only time we were kept waiting after our appointment time was at the private hospital, as it was a tiny little cancer centre and they only have one radiotherapy machine which occasionally went wrong. I cannot praise the NHS enough for what they have done for us this year.

My local hospital, The George Elliot, was in the top 10 list of the worst hospitals and spoken of during the Mid Staffs crisis and at time of the Francis Report. I will not elaborate but my mother died whilst in their care.

I am pleased to be able to say that over the recent years the hospital appears to have 'turned a corner' and for the past 2 years has shown good patient satisfaction on most counts. We have as most people had occasion to use George Elliot over the last few years and we have certainly noticed a difference and our friends too. It is good to be able to once again have faith in the care we receive from our local hospital.

The NHS is dear to every ones heart, quite rightly so and like most things in life the bad news always get's spoken of whilst the good newsnews usually get's side lined. A cynic would say bad news for the media is like gold dust. Happy stories are page fillers.

The NHS is certainly taken for granted and I think this thread is a reminder of how lucky we are to have it , warts and all.

I don't think we realise how lucky we are with the NHS and agree with previous GNs. I too Mishap know of someone who emigrated to the USA - he and his family moved 20 years ago and things got very tough for them finance-wise as the children grew up. The husband had heart problems and he decided to cut back on his medication to save money, not telling his wife or 4 children. He died aged 51, he'd cancelled payments for life and medical insurance policies and now the thousands of dollars owed to the hospitals/ doctors/OPDs etc he'd attended are passed to his wife to pay and then his children in turn.
The family cannot return to England because the USA prevents debtors leaving and effectively they are stuffed .
The NHS has it's faults but thank goodness we have it!

"My local hospital, The George Elliot, was in the top 10 list of the worst hospitals "

The hospital where I'm having my heart operation was the second worst after Mid Staffs. Three of the four GP practices in town are in the bottom two categories, two are the worst two in the county, and one of them is the second worst in the country.

It's misleading to conflate how healthcare is funded with the quality of service, proving that it's public funded is not the same as proving the quality is good. Public funding is not the same as public ownership either. If the plumbing in my mum's flat breaks down, the plumber is paid for out of her rent, but that doesn't mean he has to be a council employee.

Have a look at the work of Prof. Mildred Warner at Cornell, she has done a systematic review extending to tens of thousands of utilities in hundreds of countries. People argue endlessly about the merits of public vs private, but Warner found no overall difference either way, it was swings and roundabouts, private is more efficient in some ways, and public in others.

crun

You have obviously got a point to make re my post but I don't understand what it is.

I am not being argumentative I genuinely can't fathom a connection.

I was implying how pleased I was with an NHS Hospital 'turn around'.

What am I missing

A young professional couple in the USA were fortunate to have excellent medical insurance via employment and the total bill of $25,000 for care during pregnancy, emergency c section, and after care, was fully covered. (For my beautiful grandson) Their friends who do not have permanent employment and are self employed therefore buy their own medical insurance and cannot afford the same level of insurance cover.
None of them, in early 40s, yet have children. They can't afford that level of cover.

We are indeed blessed to have our NHS.

The care mum received in our local enormous hospital was fantastic but, apart from the registrar and the junior doctor,.communication with us , her children, was awful and very condescending. There were members of staff standing around the nurse's station but dirty plates on mum's table and dropped tissues all round the floor.

DH has found that information sharing is non- existent. We had a patient phone the other day whose Mother had lost her dentures six weeks previously, in hospital, but no one knew how to find a visiting NHS dentist despite the fact he had been to that particular ward before and left cards!

There are some dreadful examples of care - I could wax lyrical about my father's care. It makes me shudder even now.

But we would be lost without it.

Mishap I think that the NHS works well for most of the people most of the time, but the problem lies in what they do when things go wrong.

POGS in the first paragraph I was sharing a similar example of poorly rated local facilities, and the other two paragraphs were just a contribution to the thread in general, not aimed at you in particular. When I remember, I put general remarks first, then any quotes, then the comments related to the quote. Then other times I forget, and it just comes out in the order that I think of it!

Crun

Thank you.

I puzzled over that for a while

DH is able to live with his incurable cancer because of the array of drugs provided every month by the NHS. Some of them are terrifyingly expensive and would be quite impossible without the NHS. I have been in contact with Americans in the same situation and many of them are having a terrible time. Some have had to remortgage their homes and others have had to postpone or cut back on treatment because they just don't have the money. Insurance is fine up to a point but insurance companies are choosy about what treatment they will finance and a change of job can mean a change of insurance and possible loss of benefits.

The hospital where my DH was varied from ward to ward. The first ward he was admitted to was clean, tidy and friendly. The last ward was awful. Food was left lying about on tables and it was really messy and depressing. Staff were evasive and rarely made eye contact.

I was walking down a staircase and there was a huge brass plate on the wall naming all the Matrons who had been at the hospital over the decades.

I can't imagine any of these strong women tolerating food lying about, visitors sitting on beds and the general messiness.

I was in hospital as a child in 1958 and the Matron was a real tartar, but everything was well ordered, clean and calm.

I made a terrific fuss because, apart from all the other things, my husband's bed was bed 13. I couldn't seem to get it across to the staff that 13 is an unlucky number in our culture. Eventually I had it removed but I think it was SO insensitive.

The disease modifiers I take for RA cost in the region of £12000 a year. I'd been on cheap disease mods for years, until they simply stopped working and I began to really struggle with mobility, pain and disability. Couldn't hold a potato to peel it, for example. The new meds have given me my life back and each week when I inject, I give thanks to the NHS.

Like previous posters, our family has had varied experience with local hospitals. The quality of clinical care is usually good, the wards vary and I agree with those who put this down to the need for a matron type figure. The best ward my mother was on was run by a senior sister, who it was clear had the respect of the doctors and nurses she worked with. Ward clean and tidy, nursing and ancillary staff all busy - no one standing around nattering. During mums admission via A&E in the same hospital, I was irritated and disappointed to see patients hanging around whilst nursing staff stood in the centre, behind the desks, chatting, laughing, drinking cups of tea etc. Don't want to sound snitty, but it was so unprofessional and rude.

Article in BBC news today in which one man says the A&E in which he spent 20 hours on a trolley untreated. Um... I'm sorry he was unwell, and I'm sorry he had to wait so long, but the fact that he could wait that long and still tell the tale suggests to me that he didn't need to be at A&E in the first place. He could have been comfortable at home and then, hopefully have seen his GP.

Emergency means you can't wait, doesn't it? And his case wasn't an accident. It seems to me, from the information available, which isn't complete I know, that he was given wring advice by NHS Direct.

Is this yet another case of someone being sent to A&E who really didn't need to be there?

wrong

My experience of 111 is that they eventually put you through to an MD who sends an ambulance if it's thought to be necessary. A couple of times, the paramedics who arrived after we phoned 111 sent for an ambulance. bags when my mother had a bad fall at breakfast time - turned out she'd broken her foot and had some bad bruising all over - she spent all day on a trolley first in A&E and then in a sort of waiting area. She was finally admitted around 8pm. Not 20 hours, admittedly, but quite long enough. And if you go to your GP with an injury, what happens?

I don't know why I keep reading threads like this, I'm finding it harder and harder to bite my tongue. When I describe my experience of the NHS I usually get treated like a liar, or ostracised.

Thatbags: "Emergency means you can't wait, doesn't it?"

Well, yes, but appearances can be deceptive, when my arrhythmia kicks off I can sit chatting with the paramedics and look perfectly normal even though my heart rate is 230. The point is, the longer my heart rate remains at that level the more damage it does, the more likely it becomes that I will have more episodes, and the higher the risk of me having a stroke. I've been told to dial 999 within 15 minutes, but I often leave it a lot longer than that.

So far, on all nine occasions when I have needed to call an ambulance I have been at home, but I have wondered what would happen if I needed one whilst in Tesco:

"What do want an ambulance for, they're supposed to be for emergencies", or
"What's wrong with you, you look alright to me".

One of our local A&E consultants in Brighton has accused the government of lying about the crises in A&E, lying about the top down re-organization and being deluded over the situation in the NHS. As much as it pains me to say his letter is published in full in the Daily Mail and is pretty powerful stuff. Needs reading. I am no good at links people so sorry for that but daily mail/health may find it.

Bags - I think this guy had a depressed immune system and if he could not get an appointment with his GP then he was in right place in A&E.

The person who waited 11 hours on the floor for an ambulance in that article has a right to be aggrieved - what a farce.

And crun I do understand your irritation. Just because you are not about to die does not mean that your condition might not be accruing problems the longer it goes untreated. In a similar situation to yours, the ambulance was a bit slow - it took about 45 minutes to arrive (but we do live in the middle of nowhere) - but as soon as I got to A&E they shot me through and got me treated pdq - I was very impressed.

It really sounds as if the service is basically patchy in every way - between hospitals, between counties, between wards in the same hospital. There is a need to achieve some consistency so that everyone can feel confident of getting a good service.