The NHS is still functioning. I am still able to get GP appointments within two weeks, be prescribed medication, etc... . Your suggestion, if widely adopted, risks splitting the country into a two-tier system and hastening the demise of the NHS. Much better to vote in a party that will start to fund it properly and undo some of the privatisation and mismanagement that has been damaging it for years.
Ours cannot offer a telephone appointment for 3-4 weeks. That is not acceptable for pretty much any situation require healthcare.
The NHS has a record budget of £200 billion for 2022. Serious questions: How much extra money do they need to provide an adequate health service, and how would another party fund the gap considering our current economic situation?
"Ours cannot offer a telephone appointment for 3-4 weeks". This is labelled an anecdote. My anecdote is that I can always get an in-person appointment on-the-day at my London NHS GP, and I live not in a particularly affluent location.
It doesn't take much time to find raw, trusted statistics in about the same time as it took to type this message. The source I found [0} explains that:
38.9% of appointments in October 2022 took place on the same day that they were booked, 46% <= 1 day, 66% <= 1 week, 80% <= 2 weeks, 89% <= 3 weeks, 99.91% <= 4 weeks. And 73% of appointments were face to face.
There is always more to the data, sure. e.g. I just made an appointment for my GP about an annual asthma check, and I asked for it to be late next week.
If your GP can not offer a telephone appointment for 3-4 weeks, then it is clearly a national outlier. Throwing your anecdote into a heated debate does little to manage the temperature. I recommend referencing primary source information to support your assertions.
> So. All those dodgy VIP purchases the Tories made in 2020/2021. They were added as a spend on the NHS budget, to make it look like they were spending more money on our National Health Service
> The NHS has a record budget of £200 billion for 2022
Spending over the last couple of years is obviously going to be an outlier due to the effects of COVID and COVID restrictions.
> How much extra money do they need
The strangling of the NHS has been occurring over many years, so it's difficult to give a simple figure in response.
But it is telling that in 2016 junior doctors organised the first general NHS strike in 40 years in response to Hunt's contract scrapping overtime rates while increasing overtime hours. We now have a serious issue with junior doctors leaving the NHS: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hsr2.419
This year the Royal College of Nursing organised a strike for the first time in its 100+ year history, in response to years of below-inflation pay rises.
In 2018, the Health Foundation put out a response to the government's proposed budget increase of 3.4%:
> Increases of at least 4% a year are the minimum needed to tackle the backlog of financial problems from eight years of austerity. Increases of just 3.4% a year mean longer waits for treatment, ongoing staff shortages, deterioration of NHS buildings and equipment, and little progress to address cancer care.
> It’s worrying that yet again, the funding increase appears to only apply to NHS England’s budget. This excludes vital areas of health spending such as staff training, capital investment and public health. There are at least 92,000 staff vacancies in the NHS and public health spending fell by a fifth in real terms between 2013/14 and 2018/19.
£200 billion looks like a big number, but it's meaningless when critical front-line services are seeing real-terms cuts. There is a consistent pattern of the government cutting investment to the front line, ignoring the objections, and deflecting blame when the inevitable consequences occur. We are seeing those consequences not because the NHS is inherently wasteful, but because the government is choosing to make public services look like they perform badly.
It would potentially be something more like the US where your level of care is heavily dependent on what you can afford. The US is pursuing full market access for their pharmaceutical companies - who are notorious for their price gouging tactics - and the UK is in a pretty weak position post-Brexit. There's a reasonable likelihood that UK health spending will sky-rocket while patient outcomes plummet.
No, they mean something like England already has for dentistry or social care or opticians - access is available if you pay for it, and not much available if you can't pay for it.
Is it still the case that if you're in a private hospital for anything bigger than an ingrown toenail, and something goes wrong, then they'll shove you in an ambulance and take you to the nearest NHS teaching hospital, because:
- that's where all the big kit is
- that's where all the top experts are
- that's where the nurses and procedures are in place for critical care
?
Because that was the case 10 years ago. BUPA is great for seeing a doctor quickly with a non life threatening condition. And the biscuits [cookies] were nicer.
My knowledge of the NHS is almost a decade out of date though.
This helps the individual, but doesn't do much to help the NHS. The NHS is one of the best things about the UK and we need to fight for it. Making big corporation and the super wealthy pay taxes would be a good start.
It helps the NHS in as much as it reduces load on them. Though what percentage of people would have to do that to have an appreciable benefit is another matter, and it doesn’t do anything about A&E.
But the more people go private the more excuse it gives the government to privatise the NHS ("it isn't working, look how many people are going private"). Also many of the private doctors are also NHS consultants. Getting more private work might just mean they reduce the hours they do for the NHS. So it isn't clear to me that going private helps the NHS, possibly the opposite. Also, if you pay your taxes, you shouldn't have to go private.
It seems to me the main factors here are:
a) Healthcare is getting more expensive due to an ageing population and ever more elaborate and expensive treatments.
b) The greed of the wealthy (who would rather have a third card than pay taxes to fund the NHS). Who also control much of the UK media.
c) The incompetence and venality of the UK government. How many hospitals could have been built by the money paid out in fraudulent COVID loans or trousered by mates of the government for COVID PPE?
d) The lack of long-term thinking and investment. We seem to change ministers like most people change theri underwear. It is beyond shameful that the NHS is hovering up doctors and nurses trained in developing countries to make up the shortfall.
I completely understand. Overall it would be best for everyone if we had a really well run and funded NHS. But it is better for the individual (who can afford it) to pay and skip the queue. It is basically 'the tragedy of the commons'.
