Save the NHS

That was a long time ago, and yes you did.
Kittylester asked me what reforms I would do, and as I said, I think it is more important that people should be able to see properly and walk without pain, if there has to be a choice.
I do not agree that there should be a choice. If we put more of our GDP into the NHS it would not be needed. Which is why we should hound companies and individuals that do not pay their taxes
Women do not have a right to have babies. Fertility treatment is very expensive and not guaranteed to work. Would you rather someone had fertility treatment or cancer treatment, because the way the NHS is going, that is the choice CCGs will have to make.

955 votes now. 7 in the last hour. Thanks again if any of them were you.
I'll have to go to bed and stop this. It's becoming obsessive.

But then you could argue that someone doesn't have the right to have treatment if they smoke, drink excessively or are overweight. It's a slippery slope deciding who is entitled to treatment. For example, someone allows themselves to become grossly overweight and becomes diabetic as a result [I'm not saying that everyone gets diabetes as a result of their lifestyle, but it could be prevented in some cases]. Is that person more entitled to treatment than a young woman desperate for a child?

jendurham the NHS should not, and does not, decide that one person is more deserving of treatment than another, or that one condition merits more consideration than another.
What it should do, and tries to do, is provide the most effective treatments and abandon those that are not effective, based on high quality research and evidence.
I regard infertility as a distressing medical condition just as deserving of taxpayer funded care and treatment as anything else.
You seem to forget that cancer treatment does not always work either.
If I had terminal cancer, I would not want my life artificially prolonged if it meant that a young couple desperate for a child were denied treatment.

I had to witness patients being denied treatment in the 60s. Renal dialysis was just being introduced and there were very few machines available, I nursed young men with families who were unable to have treatment and died as a result.
It is extremely sad when couples can't have children but it is not life threatening and should not be covered by NHS.

Thanks for your post at 1854 yesterday, feetle. I agree. It's a disgrace.

harri in the 60's, fertility treatment wasn't available, surely your patients were denied treatment because the machines were only just being developed and not because money was being diverted elsewhere?

Done!

On the subject of priorities, drug and alcohol addiction is treated on the NHS ... and is a big drain on available funding. Rehab (in-patient treatment) is expensive and under utilised and many of them are closing down (31 in the past 2 years) www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupert-wolfemurray/nhs-rehab-is-the-nhs-trying-to-kill_b_1407675.html. There is currently a call on the government and therefore the NHS to provide specialist treatment services for "involuntary tranquilliser addiction" (google APPGITA) because the route into addiction for that group is different, in that they didn't 'ask for it' by experimentation with drugs and are therefore 'different'. So yes, how do you choose who gets what treatment and who doesn't, based on cost? I'm really surprised to learn that the NHS has to pay for chaplains, you'd think that it would be part of their pastoral work, calling on hospital patients.

It certainly used to be the case that patients' own ministers/priests/vicars/rabbis etc would visit them in hospital, though there was generally a hospital chaplain as well. Why not discontinue the chaplaincies? In some areas there may even be a majority of non-Christian patients.

Thanks for the links grannyknot

By the way everyone, in case of interest, there is a conference on UK drug policy at the moment (chair is Mark Easton) you can watch live on this link: www.ukdpc.org.uk/ukdpc-conference/

There is a very interesting article today on GPonline.com concerning the rationing of healthcare.
Using FOI requests it has been discovered that individual funding requests have risen by 19% in the last year, but the number rejected has fallen by 4%.
IFRs are used by GPs to get access to treatments that are deemed non-urgent or of low clinical value. This includes fertility treatment - 20% of applications - 10% for bariatric surgery and 10% for macular degeneration.
Cataract surgery and insulin pumps are also considered unnecessary according to some PCTs, even though they are backed by NICE.
This is the NHS postcode lottery that some people seem to think is acceptable.