Perhaps unsurprisingly, satisfaction with the NHS as measured in the British Social Attitudes survey has sunk further in 2023, with now 24% satisfied (down from 29% in 2022 & from over 50% in 2020).
Strikes, Covid & the ongoing crisis are all likely causes... but behind that lies the Tory's wrecking of the health service.
Nearly half of those surveyed thought taxes should be raised to tackle the funding shortage across the NHS (implicitly recognising its a funding issue).
The problem for a workforce plan for the NHS that includes a high dependency on incoming foreign staff, is that having once migrated for work, they will have little compunction about doing so again... having gained (valuable) experience in the NHS, but also have experienced the actuality of the NHS crisis, they often move on.
Unsurprisingly they are heading to countries were staff (nurses) are paid up to double what UK pays!
Wes Streeting's position, it seems (as told to the FT) wants the NHS to utilise private healthcare while it straightens itself out, so that in the long run it won't have to...
I mean its cute that he thinks that's possible; 'my ambition... to make the NHS so good that no one feels forced to go private'!
However, misunderstands how the private sector cherry picks medical treatments to ensure that the NHS never gets the easy to do stuff; so never 'gets better' just challenged
@dcjohnson I'll just leave you with the #brexit promotor's view on the NHS destruction.
#NigelFarage was massively supported by Arron Banks including Fartage's London home, his car and trips to the US to meet Donald Trump. Arron Banks on the #NHS: “The NHS is so Luddite because everyone believes it’s free, well it isn’t free, it comes at a massive cost, it’s unreconstructed, it’s almost communist in the way it does things,” Coincidentally, Arron Banks sells insurance.
Britain is going through the longest sustained rise in the number of working-age adults who are too sick to work since the 1990s.
The Resolution Foundation "warned that a near-record 2.7 million working-age adults were too sick to work, with the biggest increase since the Covid pandemic concentrated among the UK’s youngest and oldest workers"
There's a problem right there. "Since the covid pandemic"?
IT’S NOT OVER
People want us to bitch about the #NHS, but how can I when it gave me a CPAP machine to control my sleep apnea, and provide me with new masks periodically, free of charge.
And they’re so efficient in giving them out that I’m not here long enough to trigger a parking charge.
"Over four days [at St George's Hospital], I must have been in close contact with at least 50 members of staff. All but five or so were black, Asian or from other European countries. The #NHS would fall apart without #immigration."
"Good Law Project has learned that NHS England continued to conduct negotiations with Palantir after awarding it a highly controversial contract to manage patient data in November 2023.
We do not believe it is lawful for a public body to conduct negotiations after the award of a contract. And it is difficult to understand why the NHS might want to–it is unfair to other bidders & involves trying to negotiate after having relinquished its negotiating power" #NHS#Palantir
Since the launch of the #CassReview in 2020, the situation for trans children in the UK has continued to decline. In 2022 the UK Minister for Health called for clinicians to look for evidence of “what has caused children to be trans,”
The Cass Review was cited by the British government to justify plans to exclude trans people from legislation to ban conversion therapy.
"The health minister Maria Caulfield told Sky News it was 'pretty severe and serious stuff to be accessing notes that you don’t have permission to'."
Perfectly fine to give an international spyware company access to the entire nation's NHS records before you've even finished negotiating the terms of the contract though.
I’m just back from hospital where I had a follow-up appointment after my fall last week. I was in & out in just over an hour, including X-ray, meeting Consultant & examination. Every single member of staff was wonderful. Don’t let the media convince you that #NHS#Scotland is a disaster. It is precious.
Waiting times for NHS gender clinics continue to grow. A trans person attending their first appointment in England or Scotland today will have waited between 2 and 7 years.
(ID: Purple background with a person waiting in front of a clock)
We know that trust in the NHS has been dealing for some time.... and it would seem likely that increasing waiting lists would be a significant contributory factor to that decline.
However, new research by a team including an ex-PhD student of mine, has concluded that actually the Q. of waiting lists is immaterial to declining trust in the NHS, rather the key variables are socio-political (ethnicity, age, working situation & party affiliation).
Yesterday I went to the matinee performance of Nye at the National Theatre. The audience enticed by a pensioners reduction were mostly white in all senses of the word.
That comfortable ageing middle class audience would normally express itself in polite applause at the end carefully calibrated in length to appreciation of the play.
This was different. Frequent whoops which was not directed at the actors but at the sentiments expressed about the NHS.
This was an audience that would have been predominately Tory. But at a certain age only the NHS stands between one and mortality.
Terror is a stretcher in a hospital corridor or an hour long wait for an ambulance.
For once, a good news story on health: while the incidence of cancer continues to rise (which may also be an indication of better detection), the mortality (survival) rate is also getting better, with the cancer-related death rate dropping.
There are complex reasons for these shifts (often to do with prevention & detection, rather than successful treatment) but nonetheless we should celebrate this move in the right direction....
Researchers looked at 13 long-term studies from well-off countries including the #UK to examine what happened ‘before’ and ‘after’ public health provision was outsourced.
Their conclusion: Increases in privatisation generally corresponded with worse quality of care (who knew 😬 inc. dental)
#Starmer goes for the Mrs Merton attack at today's #pmqs
"What does the Prime Minister think it was about 100s of millions of pounds of #NHS contracts given to #FrankHester by his government that first attracted him to give ten million pounds to the Tory Government in the first place?"