maymorganlondon
Registered Shopper
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2015
- Messages
- 10,469
For chronic health conditions such as we understand Ali Y has (and Simon and Julia) I can't imagine how they keep tabs on any significant changes in the condition or conditions they have.
It seems to me the NHS is a victim of massive scope creep. No wonder so many health care trusts are permanently teetering on the brink of financial crisis.
There has been a wilful neglect of fundamentals: ensuring a steady stream of new GPs, as the doctors recruited from around the Commonwealth all joined at a similar time so have reached retirement at broadly the same time... similarly there is a problem with pharmacists at a time when one of the tactics to relieve pressure on the NHS is to turn more and more to pharmacists.
Pharmacy staff are increasingly under attack in a similar way to staff in the paramedic, ambulance and A&E services.
More and more new treatments become available each year, often at huge cost.
At some point they need to reassess what is within the "free at the point of delivery" offer, and how the remainder will be funded.
I'd hate to see a full-scale collapse of the NHS, but if successive governments continue to shirk the difficult decisions, I fear that's what's ahead of us. That could open the door for the corporate profiteering which makes US healthcare so horrifying and heartless.
Throwing money at it clearly isn't the simple solution as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pumped incredible amounts of money into it and didn't turn it around.
As much as we all can, we need to advocate for ourselves. We need to be terrier-like in pursuing tests to get the correct diagnosis and treatment.
And get that treatment before we develop the dreaded co-morbidities that ramp up the cost of treating patients.
Prevention and early intervention could slash the costs, yet nothing is invested in either area.
It seems to me the NHS is a victim of massive scope creep. No wonder so many health care trusts are permanently teetering on the brink of financial crisis.
There has been a wilful neglect of fundamentals: ensuring a steady stream of new GPs, as the doctors recruited from around the Commonwealth all joined at a similar time so have reached retirement at broadly the same time... similarly there is a problem with pharmacists at a time when one of the tactics to relieve pressure on the NHS is to turn more and more to pharmacists.
Pharmacy staff are increasingly under attack in a similar way to staff in the paramedic, ambulance and A&E services.
More and more new treatments become available each year, often at huge cost.
At some point they need to reassess what is within the "free at the point of delivery" offer, and how the remainder will be funded.
I'd hate to see a full-scale collapse of the NHS, but if successive governments continue to shirk the difficult decisions, I fear that's what's ahead of us. That could open the door for the corporate profiteering which makes US healthcare so horrifying and heartless.
Throwing money at it clearly isn't the simple solution as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pumped incredible amounts of money into it and didn't turn it around.
As much as we all can, we need to advocate for ourselves. We need to be terrier-like in pursuing tests to get the correct diagnosis and treatment.
And get that treatment before we develop the dreaded co-morbidities that ramp up the cost of treating patients.
Prevention and early intervention could slash the costs, yet nothing is invested in either area.
