the NHS

version

Well-known member
Anyone had any experience of these eye watering waiting times the media are reporting atm?

One family told BBC News an 85-year-old woman with a broken hip had waited 40 hours before a hospital admission.
She waited 14 hours for the ambulance to arrive and then 26 in the ambulance outside hospital.

A couple of people I know have recently been waiting several hours, but 40 is mind boggling - particularly with someone that old and an injury that severe.
 

version

Well-known member
When my brother did his leg about six weeks ago it took a while for the ambulance to find him because of where he fell, but other than that the surgery and recovery went about as smoothly and swiftly as you could hope for.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The standard is now 12-14 hours once you’ve been triaged

Ambulances delayed due to bed blocking due to prolapsing social care, if anything the lateral thinking of getting to A&E quicker and more safely in a taxi has surreal logic

Social care is this country’s ongoing disgrace
 

version

Well-known member
I've heard dentistry is seriously fucked atm and reports of 'home dentistry' on the rise due to people not being able to get in anywhere, NHS or private.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
NHS wait = 14 months even for a check-up, again if you can find one. If you did an audit of key services and their combined price to our health, never been worse

SNP floating Indy ref 2.0 with the current drug death rate? Worse than rest of Europe combined, unreal numbers for illicit compounds plus an hiv crisis

I know it’s not supposed to work, Control operates through flooding the most addictive short acting drugs into societal stress points but try administering naloxone without training in an actual emergency - you could well be arrested and charged with misuse of drugs 🎱
 

Leo

Well-known member
those wait times are insane, type of thing you'd think only happens in some backwards, impoverished country. we pay obscene rates for insurance and treatment, but ambulances generally show up quickly. sometimes you do wait once you arrive, but not generally as long as you all are saying. over a year for a checkup? I recently booked an appointment for five days later.
 

version

Well-known member

Apparently this is £480m now. Also, the government have been ordering NHS trusts to use Palantir's software even though they haven't gotten the contract yet and eleven of them have stopped using it for some undisclosed reason.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
What could possibly go wrong

Interacting with NHS mainframe software is a bit like this photo, both the software and your own face mid-fail crash

BEE4AEF6-4440-44A2-A293-E5304685DF55.jpeg

Govt waste is at surreal levels but there still seems hesitancy among some British people that constant ass rape is acceptable. T&trace = £37 billion, Truss budget £30 billion, debt interest £11 billion, furlough fraud £4.3 billion, PPE contracts £8.1 billion Brexit trade fall £100 billion, lost tax £40 billion

Sitting in ambulances for 20 hours outside A&E dying, waiting years and years for surgery, ridiculous levels currently being surpassed
 

version

Well-known member
I went to the hospital recently and at one point I was the only person in a waiting room of about sixty seats, maybe more, and there were never more than two other people in there with me at any one time. Something a tad unsettling about it. They wouldn't give me my results then and there like they used to and said they'd do it over the phone as they'd switched to a 'virtual clinic' to cut down waiting times, this in a more or less deserted hospital wing where you could almost hear a pin drop.

The other thing that stood out to me was they had an M&S on the ground floor, seemed a pretty glaring reminder of private sector encroachment on public services.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
or you could be an in-patient and have either the NHS a la carte food slops menu containing seagull sourced protein, or here for a higher tariff paying client we have Heston Blumenthal’s signature microwavable menu pre-prepared in a warehouse in Lowestoft, (for the latter we just add 100£ to your daily in-stay invoice)

in-patient fees are constantly floated at different rates - £5/£10/£15 per 24 hours - and seems sadly inevitable
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
^^^^this

Today was ace. Met a team of 75 clinical staff from consultancy to auxiliary level in a key sector in a British city with their core carved out

45 people off either with chronic stress or long Covid or both and of those 45 over 30 are in the process of relocating to either the US, Oz and NZ. Unrecognisable change from prior to the pandemic

The team members who were available looked beyond shattered, not thousand yard stare yet but not far off. Rafts of absentees are being covered by agency. Privatisation unchained. Their profit margin is off the scale per shift. I doubt anyone in the NHS could provide a truly accurate figure of total agency hours serviced throughout its diverse sectors but each hour is logged, catalogued and paid for regardless

First response was rage. Second was almost depression. Their morale was non-existent even if they were constantly focused on providing the best service possible. Their lead hasn’t had a day off in nearly 4 months and works every hour and then some. All their jr doctors were pickled. Fatigue = errors/mistakes. Nearly every one in their age cohort was confused about duty of care, their own learning curves, the constant requests for shift cover, patient safety, risk assessments and safeguarding policies being degraded. Went out for a meal and the mood lightened slightly but they’ll be back on duty tonight and tomorrow with no respite

A health board dept has to fail for aeons before it goes into special measures. From there who knows how long it can take restructuring alternative staffing rotation levels before you even know if they work in real time. Or if you trial it, whether the health board will take it on beyond a pilot

Grim
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Not just mouthing fuck the Tories, more wtf has happened in 14 years

Free at the point of entry? Yes, because you get fuck all

Tipping point was delta Covid wave, nothing’s been the same since, everyone is operating from a compromised starting position
 

ghost

Well-known member
Haven't gone too deep on the NHS itself, but I do suspect the failures of it are related to the phenomena that the UK ends up paying more for rail than anywhere else in Europe, mostly due to bureaucratic failure.

Seems to me that the ideology in the UK (quite similar to that in the US) is one of unaccountable privatizations and outsourcing to cut costs—which drives cost inflation, which raises further alarms, for which the cure is more leeches.

Mostly the US has avoided the sheer severity of decline only because the rest of the economy is usually doing well enough to bail ourselves out.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
It is weird seeing its decline up close

We were used to 4 hours in A&E, not knowing where you were in the system after 6 hours etc but now it’s more like 16-20-24 hours, once your triage assessment is done and you’re deemed as not being an immediate death risk

Social care for seniors is the largest prolapse. No-one wants to invest coverage for a boomer generation whose shelf life doesn’t seem to ‘justify’ extensively significant infrastructure reform when the majority will be gone in 15 years

No discharge to social care = elderly patients bed blocking = ambulances stacking up outside emergency rooms = longer waits for ambulance blue light calls = waiting 20 hours for a blue light with a broken leg = jfc
 
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