Too often I have spoken to patients who have been appallingly treated by a doctor or hospital but who are terrified to say anything because they still depend on that doctor and hospital for treatment. It's not that protesting makes no difference: patients are too scared to protest. Those who do find it a draining, horrendous battle, not a simple process of exercising choice and going elsewhere. Doctors are gods, immune from criticism or pressures to improve their act.
Milburn unintentionally highlighted the consequences of lack of choice last month when he graded each hospital from zero to three stars. Now you may know your hospital is officially recognised as hopeless, but you still have no choice but to go there. Patients are given no information about how good or bad a particular doctor is, such as basic mortality figures, which they are in some other countries.
The fiction that all doctors are equal ensures that bad ones have no incentive to improve. Too often, GPs have told me they would never send a member of their family to a certain hospital consultant, but they send their patients to him because they have to. Half of cancer operations are done by surgeons with no specialist cancer training, who have far lower survival rates than specialists, but there is no way you, as a patient, can find out.
The NHS recruits without qualms doctors struck off in other countries for malpractice. Richard Neale, the disgraced gynaecologist, was struck off in Canada and but allowed to carry on butchering people in the NHS. The doctors at Bristol Royal Infirmary carried on killing babies with impunity, and without the parents being given any clue about their deathly incompetence.
It is no coincidence that the NHS harboured the biggest mass murderer in history - the GP Harold Shipman, a known drug addict, who probably killed around of his patients.
Other countries have doctors as psychopathic as Shipman, but only the NHS has such contempt for patients that it doesn't notice when they are being massacred. It is inevitable that a state monopoly offering free services will treat patients like mindless sheep, forcing them to accept whatever they are given, and it deprives the health service of a powerful force for good. The determination of sick people and their relatives to find the best treatment and care is wondrous to behold, but this energy is not harnessed by the NHS but crushed by it, forcing people into soul-destroying battles.
The desire of millions of patients to improve their treatment should be a huge power for reform in the NHS, but, instead, reform is driven by civil servants sitting in offices in Whitehall issuing diktats.
Too long have I written about the tragedies and cruelty of the National Health Service; too long have we as a country accepted it. The Government can fiddle with it as long as it likes, but the very structure of the NHS ensures it will never be world class.
The noble ideology of communism had to be ditched because it didn't work. So the noble ideology behind the NHS should be ditched because it costs lives. We should ditch the ideology and ditch the NHS.
This article is more than 20 years old. Observer health editor Anthony Browne, once a passionate believer in the NHS, tells why he now feels it can never work and is only kept alive by wrong-headed idealism. Through the NHS, we plough our time and money into palliative care instead of investing in the right treatment at the right time.
But lapses in care and service go beyond this. There needs to be a responsibility and accountability for bad service. And if the solution, one might argue, is more money for the NHS, then where will it come from? Tax increases are always unpopular, even if they would go to fund free health care for all something that I would always want for any country in the world. Economists like Steven D. Meanwhile, others have argued that changing the ethos of the NHS might lead to greater savings and less waste, thereby improving service and care.
Investing in population health and preventing disease is highly cost-effective—by reducing future demand on NHS services, preventive measures have the potential to save the NHS billions of pounds. These are all tangible fixes, and make sense. But, until we stop pretending that the health care system is perfect and blame inadequate government spending for every issue the NHS has, we are destined to be cared for by the hollow shell of a rapidly failing utopian ideal.
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The formal complaints procedure is out of reach for anyone who values their mental health. Policy decisions are kept far away from patients. Not one person sits on the NHS England board in the sole capacity of a patient. Who represents our views? With no opportunity to campaign for better, disillusionment breeds frustration.
Harsh words are spoken. The public is perceived as too passionate, too uncontrollable. Behind closed doors, financial decisions take priority over human life. Propaganda states that private hospitals are the devil for putting profits first — but is this worse than an NHS at the mercy of an austerity-leaning government?
I paint a picture steeped in impossibility — everything seems just too difficult. The NHS in its current form is a system born of policy, targets and financial investment. Viewing it as such allows us to talk frankly about what we actually want from a health service without worrying about denigrating overworked staff or bruising our national pride.
Hard questions do not just need posing, they also need answering. How long does Grandma really need wait for her hip replacement? A month, or two. Do we really want our hardworking doctors and nurses run in to the ground? Definitely not.
Instead, they will form a transparent contract outlining what the public can expect from the NHS, with no place for blind trust in vague promises. Solid expectations would empower us all to champion ourselves. But to reach this open and honest world, culture needs to change. Red pens should be wielded to cut the jargon that makes strategy so inaccessible. Complaints should be treated as opportunities to improve rather than pesky letters to be dismissed and ignored by departments that are so distanced from the front line.
Leaders must stop seeing policy as a set of divine commandments inscribed in stone, but guidance to be challenged and upgraded. I could not have put it better and hope that the Kings Fund also read the comments listed to the items they publish ….. Unfortunately we're not best placed to advise on your situation and we would advise that you try contacting these organisations or individuals:.
We're sorry that we're not able to help directly but we hope that these organisations are able to. The doctors , nurses, front staff are wonderful and brave. The trouble is this paints a veneer when the organisation behind falls short.
I have a consultant the earliest can see is three weeks. No co ordination, no guidance except for YouTube which is a godsend. Schoolboy sign on door saying waiting time 4 hours. Not great on a plastic chair with a bladder about to burst.
Staff are too rushed to improve levels of care that have in many areas fallen below countries such as Turkey, Portugal and Poland. Almost 75, more doctors and nurses are needed to match standards in similar countries the OECD said in its annual Health at a Glance study comparing the quality of healthcare across 34 countries. Britain was placed on a par with Chile and Poland as countries still lagging behind the best performers in survival following diagnosis for different types of cancer.
The UK came 21st out of 23 countries on cervical cancer survival, 20th out of 23 countries on breast and bowel cancer survival and 19th out of 31 countries on stroke. The UK is ranked 20th out of 32 countries on heart attack deaths. What they are doing is going through the processes
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