England’s rundown hospitals are ‘outright dangerous’, say NHS chiefs

17 comments

1. £180 + Billion a year ‘White Elephant’.

   Envy of the world?

   I think not.

2. Big problem we have is stuff like paying £9 per hospital visit gets suggested and people go “THEY ARE PRIVATISING THE NHS”

   NHS has never been privatised yet anything to help it improve gets touted as that happening, more money needs to get thrown into the pot

3. Nearly 15 years of Tory budget cuts and then they wonder why the nhs is struggling.

4. Decline, all around us.

   It’s hard to be optimistic when everyone is crumbling with no obvious plan or solutions.

5. Need to really embrace AI and technology across the UK.

   Thats the only get out of jail free card we have.

6. So MORE money for the NHS? it’s a fucking bottomless pit

7. So many people here don’t understand what’s been happening in the NHS for so long.

   The tories cut overtime pay for doctors. Waiting times go up.

   The tories keep refusing wage increases. Shortage of nurses and doctors, wait times go up.

   The tories add more and more arbitrary unreachable targets with fines for breach. The trust has less money therefor what? Wait times go up.

   Brexit hits, less qualified nurses and doctors from abroad. Wait times go up.

   Covid hits, the tories do NOTHING to help. Wait times skyrocket.

   How do we fix this? Introducing private NHS appointments.

   Get referred to hospital > be seen within 18 weeks (doctor needs to order tests, etc) > f/up in 18 months (remember the wait times kept going up?) > now you can pay the trust to be seen earlier BY THE SAME DOCTOR because now 30% of his time is reallocated to “private” appointments with the NHS.

   This has been a process that has taken over a decade, planned by the tories and executed slow enough that people can’t see it. Covid helped speed up the time line but the plan has always been there. Next up would have been to start privatising chunks of the NHS due to the wait list “crisis”.

   The NHS is one of the largest companies in the world, their purchasing power alone is absolutely nuts. They could demand a price from sellers for the global NHS and procure everything they need at huge discounts, but instead each individual trust makes their own deals. There are a mountain of ways the NHS could be streamlined and nothing is done. Why?

8. The tories wanted to run the system into the ground. Then were consulting US companies about a replacement. Reform are wanting this as well. Think about that the next time they want your vote.

9. Perhaps if they’d not spent all their capital budgets on wage rises instead of facilities they wouldn’t have this problem.

   https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-capital-investment

10. People see ” NHS”, and think it is run by the state, and have no idea how much is outsourced to private companies. I recently retired from my long nursing career at a large, provincial, university hospital trust.

    The following were all managed by private companies :
    Parking, security, laundry, wages, lab. services, cleaning, catering, physio, portering, maintenance, ambulance services. That left medical and nursing staff. They got rid of the in-house nursing bank, which was made up of in-house staff, looking to pick up extra shifts, and nurses who lived locally, but were available on a flexible basis to fit in with family commitments. These shifts were only ever paid at the most basic rate.

    I worked with agency nurses, who were earning a fortune, and, although some were good, there were far too many only turning up for the money, and, they were not held to the same standards as regular staff. As long as the managers could say that they had ” enough” staff, they generally were not too concerned about the quality. I could have spent hours filling in online ” Incident forms”, but nobody was very bothered.

    The U.K. has lost so many hospital beds, and we all know how the population has increased. The pressure to discharge patients is unbelievable. There were occasions when I refused to send a patient home, because I felt they were still so unwell, they would end up coming back, which did not make me popular with managers, but, a discreet word with doctors and family usually worked. Hospital managers fear any bad publicity, and these days people do not hesitate to kick up a fuss.

    Truthfully, where I worked, I would have said that the care we were able to give was, at least, acceptable up until around 2012, but then the descent started, gradually at first, and then it fell over the cliff.

    I am so sad to see what has happened.

11. I was on an 18 month surgery waiting list. I should be getting my surgery next year.but I deteriorated quickly so had it done as an emergency this summer.

12. No no The hospitals are fine, its all Lucy Letbys fault that babies are dying!

13. Time has come to seriously discuss replacing the NHS with a European system – the government stays out of production, but heavily subsidizes consumption.

14. The impact of austerity on physical facilities (schools as well, and other less obvious things like court buildings) is an absolute disgrace. The new government just needs to unlock a huge stack of capital investment money – borrowing to fund it if necessary, it’s a one time cost with a big pay off – to fix all these buildings.

15. I’m in an office with pretty bad damp and mould, the windows have moisture on the inside most mornings. Estates will repaint yearly but that’s the extent of it, but there’s no chance of serious repairs in a non patient area and in a Victorian building.

    It’s quite worrying health wise, but management won’t move us as the whole building is the same and there’s nowhere else to put us.

16. Surprised to see no mention of PFI in these comments.

17. If only the Tori3s had not destroyed NHS and wasted taxpayers money on the PPE scandal and other corruption scandals…

    Voters have responsibility too for voting for voting for the m.

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