NHS England

Grantanow As cooking Sunday lunch, I suddenly remembered the really good work Gordon Brown did for mental health.
I watched Question Time from Hoddesdon and was impressed with the question posed about the 53rd minute on mental health. Felt as if someone had been asking the right question at last. However the responses for me only reinforced all that is flawed with mental health systems here.

The graph produced by Fiona Bruce on Thursday's Question Time gives the lie to Tory claims about NHS funding. Here is the link.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bbc-question-time-health-spending-graph_uk_63c9cf22e4b0c2b49ad437a3

The graph is based on the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies' work.

It clearly shows the Tories and the LibDem/Tory coalition massively underfunded the NHS for the past 12 years compared with Labour's much higher level if support under Blair and Brown. The very last Tory year is of course pandemic money so doesn't reflect the annual Tory underfunding.

Quince, the Tory Minister on QT, could not justify the underfunding.

Some English is spoken in Cuba but mainly Spanish so yes, probably not going to work! But maybe interesting to find out about how Cuba arranges its health care?

From what I can find out, Cuba seems to have a different model for training doctors and nurses to ours plus the role of the gp is based in the community so that a personal relationship exists. Yearly check ups by the same gp are given.Notably there’s a very high number of doctors and nurses in the system. Cuba sends a large number of doctors to Third World countries but there are issues around the low salaries paid.
Obviously I have taken this information from the internet and if there’s any truth at all in this, perhaps we should ask Cuba for help until we have trained sufficient numbers ourselves?
I know it sounds bonkers but that’s how it is…..

It's the incompetent Tory government that should budget better. What happened to the Brexit bus money that Johnson talked about?

Sky News reports that Tory MP Simon Clarke is defiant after saying nurses using food banks 'should budget better'

Does he really think that qualified nurses who we trust with our lives to correctly administer medications, really do not know how to budget properly?

The Tories are trying to turn the clock back to before 1947. Most people can't afford private treatment. In the olden days people had to pay unless they were lucky enough to receive charitable help from a GP or go to a local hospital set up by a municipal body. My grandfather had two fingers amputated in the 1930s on the kitchen table by a kindly GP after an industrial accident. We need a better NHS free at the point of delivery. The Tories cannot be trusted.

One of the reasons the agencies exist is the introduction of IR35. The rules are complicated so I won't go into them. The agencies that were used to employ the staff often insisted that the individual used an umbrella company. The individual was employed by the umbrella company who operated PAYE and more recently started to deduct pension contributions. They used rather devious ways of paying the individual so that the worker paid less tax. HMRC started to investigate this some years back and I know that they were looking at doctors.

who owns those agencies, and who is making very large sums of money
Some are registered in tax havens too.

Perhaps some are not and are reputable, providing a good service.

Perhaps the heading should be amended as this situation applies to the whole of the UK?

It stinks, and there is only one word, well several, for it

fraud and corruption.

Germanshepherdsmum

Surely we all know that hospitals and care homes use agency staff and that it’s very costly to do so. The agencies are not siphoning money from the NHS. It’s either agency staff or no staff - which would you prefer?

And they are not ‘privatised NHS agencies’.

The point I would like to be sure about- is who owns those agencies, and who is making very large sums of money by providing very expensive satff, taking a large cut along the way- to a system that has been brought down to its knees by a group of people- and the links to those now making the profits.

Get my drift? Same for PPE, Nightingale Hospital and all sorts of other procurement contracts.

If you can't see why this is VERY important ...

Questions are being asked why the government is sticking to its cap on medical and dentistry places.
A shortage of doctors and other medical staff has been described as the biggest challenge facing the NHS.
But the number of places at UK medical schools are capped - in England this year there are 7,500 places.
England's Education Secretary James Cleverly told the BBC that you can't just "flick a switch" to increase the capacity to train more doctors.
Students offered incentive to delay medical degree
We can't live on NHS bursary, say medical students
How much will university cost me?
Medicine is one of a handful of courses where numbers are limited by the government, because the cost is heavily subsidised.
In 2020 and 2021 the government lifted the cap on numbers, which last year led to more than 10,000 places being accepted.
But this year the cap in England is being reintroduced.
Library are with reading lounge, The Forum Exeter University, Exeter, United Kingdom, Architect: Wilkinson Eyre Architects, 2012.
From the BBC website…

Callistemon21

Aveline

This crisis won't be helped by merely doling out more money to Drs and nurses. I want to hear how many more training places are being provided so that in four to six years we just might have enough staff. Until then?

I want to hear how many more training places are being provided so that in four to six years we just might have enough staff

Yes.

And without underpaid staff coming out of training with huge debts to pay off.

Didn’t the government reduce the number of training places for doctors recently?

Casdon yes I am in the South East

Hetty58

My daughter's friend has left nursing - to work for a gardening firm. She had such a dreadful time working ridiculous hours in an ICU during the worst of the pandemic, it broke her.

'Holding their hands as they died, with an overwhelming sense of utter despair, then going home shattered but still unable to sleep' was how she described it. Who would want that job?

Heart breaking to read and as we know, not an isolated case.

We need to accept many teachers, social workers and nurses for example work for agencies because it gives flexibility and autonomy. Improve working conditions, give staff flexible hours like they get in agencies and many will take up permanent jobs

I don't think the BBC documentary, filmed by staff of a Welsh ICU during the first outbreak of Covid, is still available, which is a pity.

My daughter's friend has left nursing - to work for a gardening firm. She had such a dreadful time working ridiculous hours in an ICU during the worst of the pandemic, it broke her.

'Holding their hands as they died, with an overwhelming sense of utter despair, then going home shattered but still unable to sleep' was how she described it. Who would want that job?

Is it being over-simplistic to say if NHS pay and conditions were better, and paid bank nurses well too, agencies would have a greatly reduced role?

I missed Casdon's post.

varian

Should there not be a staff agency within the NHS which could pay temps and locums just as well as the private agencies but cost less because there would be no profit syphoned off??

Well, that's such a good idea, varian but far too simple!!

You need to suggest it to the Government!!

GrannyGravy13

Casdon

Yammy

GrannyGravy13

The NHS has always used Agency Staff whether they be nurses, doctors, clerical or cleaners.

NHS Scotland’s bill was £92 million last year for nurses alone Paddyann54

Your right Granny Gravy. When I taught most of the mums who were nurses were agency, so they could choose their hours and holidays. I've been retired for a long time.

Use of agency staff is a more recent phenomenon than you’d expect in the NHS in fact. There were medical agencies, primarily used for locums to cover long term sickness, but it’s only in the last 30 years or so that agencies have sprung up for other professions. I worked in a large teaching hospital in the nineties where the Chief Exec banned all non medical agency staff being employed, we had relief staff employed by the hospital who filled the gaps. It worked well - it wouldn’t now, because there aren’t enough staff.

I was a clerical temp in a hospital 40 years ago.

That hospital would not have continued without the use of temps (including medical) then and it definitely wouldn’t now.

Are you in the south east or London by any chance GrannyGravy, as the use of non medical agency staff started there, because the NHS didn’t pay enough to be attractive to permanent staff compared with private industry? I worked in a very large teaching hospital in the midlands in the eighties, and we didn’t have them there, the NHS still attracted permanent staff then (and we had a nurse training school, medical school etc. in the city).

varian

Should there not be a staff agency within the NHS which could pay temps and locums just as well as the private agencies but cost less because there would be no profit syphoned off??

There are staff banks in nearly all hospitals, but not the people to work for them. The staff bank pays at the Agenda for Change pay rate though, not anywhere near the same rate as people get working for agencies.

Should there not be a staff agency within the NHS which could pay temps and locums just as well as the private agencies but cost less because there would be no profit syphoned off??

Casdon

Yammy

GrannyGravy13

The NHS has always used Agency Staff whether they be nurses, doctors, clerical or cleaners.

NHS Scotland’s bill was £92 million last year for nurses alone Paddyann54

Your right Granny Gravy. When I taught most of the mums who were nurses were agency, so they could choose their hours and holidays. I've been retired for a long time.

Use of agency staff is a more recent phenomenon than you’d expect in the NHS in fact. There were medical agencies, primarily used for locums to cover long term sickness, but it’s only in the last 30 years or so that agencies have sprung up for other professions. I worked in a large teaching hospital in the nineties where the Chief Exec banned all non medical agency staff being employed, we had relief staff employed by the hospital who filled the gaps. It worked well - it wouldn’t now, because there aren’t enough staff.

I was a clerical temp in a hospital 40 years ago.

That hospital would not have continued without the use of temps (including medical) then and it definitely wouldn’t now.