PippaZ
foxie48
I'd like to see social care and the NHS brought closer together, it is a waste of money having elderly people blocking beds in NHS hospitals because there is nowhere suitable in the community for them. We also need a more multi-disciplinary approaches to care so that people don't get shuffled between departments as much, again it's very wasteful of resources and not a great experience for the patient either. We also need to examine whether a "free at point of contact" NHS is still a viable option. IMHO we'll never have the money to pay the staff (including cleaners etc) adequately until we have brought the service into the 21stC, when it was designed in 1948 it was a very different world and offered pretty basic care compared to today, however, is there a political party brave enough to do that?
The elderly are people too foxie48 and describing them as bed-blocking is not what you would do with any other group.
I do agree on the multi-disciplinary point although I have a feeling (yet again) that this is what we used to do. From a personal point of view, my mother was shifted from ward to ward to a different hospital to a care assessment home. For someone with Alzheimer's it was torture. She did then go to a lovely home where she celebrated her 99th birthday two weeks later. The carers understand things nurses and doctors either don't or are not allowed to take into account. We need to ensure they have suitable qualifications that bring a properly placed salary with them.
If we don't have free at the point of contact you change what we have aimed for since the war; since all those killed had the same simple cross on the same simple grave. If you don't believe in increasing equality then of course you are right to look at "free at the point of need" (not contact).
Again I half agree with you about the updating but I am very aware the NHS staff were treated like people on a manufacturing line at one point. I always remember the "tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I behave" quote. Humans are clever and if you measure them in a way that doesn't work for people (although it may work for widgets) they will find a way around it. But we have seen we need to use technology, take it on board and work with it in the NHS.
At 72 I am considered "elderly" and bed blocking is a term used in the NHS. It is a huge frustration in pretty much every NHS hospital that "elderly" people who would be happier and in a better care situation, are staying far too long on medical wards when actually they no longer need the level of nursing care in a hospital. Not an opinion a fact, most younger patients would have been discharged into the community.
I don't disagree with anything in your second point and having looked after my MIL until she died in late 2019 at the great age of 101 I am not unaware of the challenges of caring for the very elderly.
I don't know of any other health care system which is free at point of contact. It isn't about equality, it's about affordability. One of the huge strengths of the NHS is the quality of care you get when you need it most regardless of how deep your pockets are, however, I'd be happy to pay for services if it meant a better service for everyone generally and I don't think I am alone in that.
My daughter is a hospital doctor (anaesthetist) and my niece is a surgeon so I get an insight into the NHS from people who work in it, neither do private work. There is huge waste, both stand around when lists are cancelled because there isn't an intensive care bed, because they can't move patient A onto a ward because they can't discharge patient B into a suitable care home. The search for beds even before covid was a daily scramble. Which brings us back to point 1. Where the widgets and manufacturing line in your post come in, I'm really not sure. One thing is certain though, with the technological and medical advances that we have made since 1948 the NHS is able to treat illness and injury that would have been fatal, but there is a cost to this. If in the last budget, VAT had been increased by 1% to pay for improvements to the NHS, I for one, would have been very happy to pay up!
