Is the NHS safe in Tory (or Labour) hands

Do they think that everyone has a family who can leave work to spend 24 hours a day with them, or the money to check into a nursing home to convalesce?

Yes I do Elegran

Sorry for cutting and pasting, but otherwise my post would have made no sense at all.

And you are stretched almost to breaking point with all you do for your family, gillybob. They are lucky to have you, and that you still have the stamina to do it. so many older people live alone, away from their families and not in a community that can help them.

Complaining that older people are "bedblocking" when there is nowhere for them to go, and no-one to keep an eye on them, is a catch-22 situation.

Delayed transfer of care is an awful term!
A person then sounds like a bag of potatoes!
Never mind.

Sounds like Social Care should be given a lot more money.

The budget for social care has been cut let alone convalescent care. I have an elderly aunt who was taken straight back to hospital by the caring and professional ambulance driver who found that her heating had broken down, and thus he said that he was not prepared to discharge her to her home. So, technically she was a bed blocker ( horrid ugly term). She lives alone with support, but that is no good when you have no heating and are almost immobile. Delayed transfer of care is a better term than bed blocker, at least the first term sounds as if it is the fault of the care provider, not of the patient.

I don't know how to do it but perhaps somebody could put a link up to:-

'INTEGRATE PERSONAL COMMISSION ' which starts hopefully in April.

It has been spoken of by Jeremy Hunt and NHS chief executive Simon Stevens but hasn't been covered by the media very much.

It could be a good move .

INTEGRATING PERSONAL COMMISSION not INTEGRATE PERSONAL COMISSION

What is it about?

I find it terribly sad that some elderly people never see their family from one week/month/year to the next Elegran and that some old people are looked at as a burden by their own flesh and blood, which is shameful. On the other hand, I do think that hospitals and social services tend to take advantage when they see that an elderly person does have someone who cares about them and just assume that you can drop everything to give 24 hr care. Before my grandma left hospital last year, social services came to speak to her (in hospital) without anyone present and she told them quite happily that I would be there for her every need and they allowed her home on that basis. It took me quite a while to get a care package in place where carers call in to see her during the day.

This is the most recent article I can find with a quick google, POGS but at least it explains what it is.

www.england.nhs.uk/2014/09/04/ipc-prospectus/

White wave

It's been spoken of for a while but has had very little media cover, not bad news I suppose so no mileage in reporting it.

It's a proposal that is going to hopefully be put in place in April and it is about joining up health and social care. As a lot of people make comments about it I thought they might like to read about something that is actually being done.

Anna. Thank you .

Had a long discussion about this with a friend who's a GP, and certainly the lack of care in the community is a major factor, Royal United Hospital in Bath has 12 hour trolley waits today, Gloucester and Cheltenham hospitals closed to admissions.

Another friend's 2 year old GD had to be admitted to a hospital 80 miles from home because of no beds, thankfully she's now back home.

Gillybob sadly this isn't at all unusual in my experience, the patient says my daughter, son, neighbours etc will look after them and then when Social Services are needed urgently that person is low priority because the daughter, son etc are caring for them.

30 years ago that happened to me when I found a very elderly lady, whose son lived in Australia, had fallen on a bridle path and broen both wrists. I only knew her by sight, had never spoken to her in my life but because my details were taken it was assumed I was next of kin. It took me 7 weeks to get Social Services to sort it out, during which I had to drive 6 miles three times a day, shop, clean, cook etc whilst looking after a young family. Doesn't seem to have changed much

If I was deemed to be over a certain income level, I would willingly pay towards the NHS. I am now over 70. I remember when I 'retired' at age 60 I was no longer required to pay NI, yet I carried on teaching, sometimes full time then later supply work. for 4 more years. This didn't make sense. I am tired of being made to feel guilty because I am elderly. As has been said on GN many times. we still make many valuable contributions to society.
I think a lot of today's problems are down to political interference, attempts to save money, a total lack of thinking things through, unconsidered consequences. Just look what they have done to education!
(But they would have to spend it on the NHS)

loopylou I'm so impressed that you were kind enough to go to all that trouble for someone you barely knew. I realise it was more or less forced on you but I'm sure some people would have just refused.

DH says my middle name is Mug but honestly didn't think I had any choice back then, know the system better now!

I read something earlier today about someone who was waiting in an A&E at the weekend, it was packed with people who were vomiting, forcing some people to wait out in the car park because they didn't want to catch it if it was a virus.

Now I don't know if they were vomiting because they had a virus or because they were drunk, but either way, to my mind, they should not have been in A&E.

ayse It is a fallacy that the NHS makes a 'profit' that can be ploughed back into the service, which goes to private companies when services are contracted out.
If the NHS provides the service in-house as it were, then the NHS pays the costs of that service out of the money provided by the Treasury. There is no profit, which can be defined as the fee charged for a service, less the costs of providing that service.

The idea of contracting out services came about because politicians looked at the costs of providing a service, and thought that they could pay a private company to provide it more cheaply, by paying staff less for example. There is also the question of transfer of risk.

So in that sense, the money saved by the Government paying less for a particular service, by contracting out, could be ploughed back into the NHS. If pigs flew, of course.

The problem with contracting out services is not that the companies make a profit - all companies have to make a profit, or they wouldn't exist.
It is more a problem of ethos - that private companies would have something other than the well being of patients as their main priority.
But you could argue that the ethos of the NHS has been eroded irreparably by the target-setting ethos that has been imposed on NHS employees anyway.

Just to be clear, I'm not in favour of contracting out to private companies. I would much rather the NHS was well-managed and well-funded and staff felt proud to work for it.

Rosequartz People in receipt of 'good' pensions already pay tax on those pensions. National insurance is an employment-related tax, funded by employers as well as employees.
To tax people in the basis of their age would be a novel idea and could almost certainly be challenged as age-discrimination.

Most people use the NHS the most at the beginning and end of their lives - would you place an extra tax burden on the parents of young children, or those suffering a terminal illness in middle age?

What I would like is for the political parties just to state very clearly what their plans for the NHS are and how they plan to finance it in detail, so we can decide who to vote for. This constant shouting at each other on the subject (see H of P on the news today) is unedifying and gets us nowhere.

I have always been against contracting out services in the NHS - it totally misses the point of the concept of "service." But I guess we are too far down that road now to turn back easily.

Targets are all very well but underlying them is an assumption that workers in the NHS/ambulance service etc require these in order to function efficiently - it is really quite insulting. Most people who go into these public services do so with a sense of vocation and desire to help others. This sort of target-setting is almost insulting to them. And it encourages a sort of game-playing to get round those rules, which is counter-productive and makes everyone feel uncomfortable.

The personal and psychological aspects of working in health care are assets that are sidelined and undervalued. So many staff are beaten down by all this nonsense and lose all job satisfaction. These aspects are as important as money. If only the "planners" sitting round their tables coming up with ideas that look good on paper could think at a human level, things might get better.

janea in answer to your last paragraph, no I would not charge them extra because they are paying national insurance anyway if they work and contributing.

However, I thought that part of the NI stamp went to help pay in some small measure for the NHS and, after retirement, we cease to pay a NI stamp at all.
I see no reason why a pensioner should not continue to pay the proportion of the NI which goes to fund the NHS which I understand is about 2% - if their income is above a certain level that is.

If we were living in a country without a free NHS we would be paying a very large proportion of our income in health insurance.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/01/real-root-ae-crisis-lies-far-beyond-wards

I'm fed up with the idea, pushed hard in the time of the dreaded Margaret Thatcher, that paying tax is a bad thing and something that we all want to avoid. I was delighted when I was able to earn enough to pay tax and consider it to be a way of contributing to society. It makes me very cross that the Lib Dems have arranged for the personal allowance to go up and up and so the amount I earn would not qualify for income tax if it weren't that I now get my pension. I haven't handed over my certificate to my employer and so continue to pay a small amount of NI as a rebellion. (Fortunately we are not reliant on my pay and so can afford to do so; I realise that it isn't a choice for everyone.)

Personally, I would be happy to pay more tax if it were going to the NHS and not, as Iam64 says, to wars in the Middle East or to replacing Trident.

About there being a lack of medical staff; that can at least in part be attributed to bad planning. In the 90s, it was known that the Working Time Directive was coming and so it would not be possible to make doctors work as some used to in my young days, 90 or 100 hours a week. It was also obvious, once medical students were being accepted on academic results and not with gender quotas, that there would be a far greater proportion of women. Because of simple biology, there was going to be a greater need for maternity leave. Then at least some of the medically-qualified mothers were going to want to take a career break and/or work part-time. Then some of the men were going to think that they would like a better work/life balance too, and why not?

As politicians mostly have their eyes set on the next election, at most 5 years away, they are not very good at long-term planning, and the money which would have been required to increase the intake at medical schools was not as high a priority as it should have been. Therefore we are importing doctors to work out-of-hours shifts and parts of the NHS are staffed on a hand-to-mouth basis.

As for nurses, I wonder if the widespread use of 12-hour shifts has made many leave the profession - I don't think I could have done such a physically- and mentally-demanding job for 12 hours at a time until retirement.

Personally, I am tired of watching the news and seeing that A+ E departments are overwhelmed with “the elderly” who then become bed blockers. The naive may be forgiven for thinking that coaches have been laid on for “the elderly” to take them to A+E for an outing and leaving them there.
Recent government DATA has shown that nearly a million extra people visited A+E in one year purely and simply because they were unable to get a GP appointment in a reasonable time. The DATA didn’t show that the million people were the coach loads of elderly looking for an afternoon out.
While I accept that we have an aging population with increasingly complex medical needs, we also have a general public with high expectations who are bombarded with health information to seek medical advice. The worried individual, who cannot get a GP appointment for a week or two, can find themselves in A+E, just to be safe. The much trumpeted 111 number frequently refers the enquirer onto medical advice, which if it’s out of hours, is the local A+E. and if you have a child who is sick, and your surgery is closed, what should you do? 111 will refer you to A+E so you might as well go straight there. There are also the hoards of alcohol related injuries most nights. There is also the blame culture that insists that the minor accident at school or work needs checking out, just to be sure.
In the past couple of years, I have twice had personal experience of A+E. once was a bank holiday when my mother broke her hip (she fell when getting onto the coach full of elderly bed blockers…..I’m joking) and secondly when I fell and broke my wrist. Looking around the department, I wasn’t surrounded by these elderly bed blockers. There were some elderly people there but most patients were under pension age. On my last visit, sitting in the post triage area, I saw a twenty something woman on crutches and a bandaged foot, a workman, still in his work gear with a bloodied hand, a young lad with a bleeding nose, escorted by two policeman, several teens sitting morosely, three broken wrists/arms (I was one of them), a drunk with a black eye, and a large number of under 65’s just sitting there with no obvious issue.
Throwing money at the NHS encourages more of the same. It is a service bleeding from a thousand cuts, both funding but also from poor management and waste. There is no single cause or solution for our ailing NHS. So please, let’s stop singling out particular groups of people and laying the blame at their door

joolz read the consultants letter and you will realize that it is only the politicians singling particular people out.

No it isn't.

The last twice I have been in A&E [admittedly accompanying very elderly people], my experience has been the same as jjolz1954. The usual cut finger, knock on head etc on the whole younger or middle aged people. Scarcely an elderly person in sight.
And our area is known for having a largely elderly population.
But all areas are different. So perhaps no one that doesnt work in these places, and different areas of the country, can give a true overall picture of the country as regards a&E.