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The NHS is great at emergency care. I came down with a severe infection a few months ago and landed in Glan Clwyd. I was practically grabbed as I staggered thro

The NHS is great at emergency care. I came down with a severe infection a few months ago and landed in Glan Clwyd. I was practically grabbed as I staggered through the door, and spent a few days in a private room (!!!) white they figured out whether what I had was infectious. Then a few days on a general ward, then discharged, well enough to finish sorting myself out at home. The staff were lovely, friendly, genuinely caring people - although I worry for their futures, given that most were EU nationals, and the only UK natives were agency staff. In my less delirious moments we chatted about the impending brexit vote - very worried faces. When it comes to long term or weird and wonderful stuff - not so great. I've been bouncing around referrals for five years, and the lack of digital records means that they have to mail 30lbs of paper to each other before I show up. If the records didn't arrive, I have to dictate my case. Again, and again, and again. Still undiagnosed. One particularly spectacular SNAFU ended up with me having unnecessary surgery, because someone read the wrong notes. Their core infrastructure is in dire need of modernisation. The government seem to think the answer is creeping privatisation. If they hadn't wasted £14bn on lining their chums pockets, the NHS would probably be pretty unassailably brilliant by now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health

retbull 10y ago
It isn't like that doesn't happen here in the US. That sounds like part bureaucratic problem and part difficulty of diagnosis. I know plenty of people who ended up in similar situations or got the wrong diagnosis for years despite having pretty good medical insurance. You'd still have to get your medical records transferred around.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zigzigzag 10y ago
You talk about "they" as if government is a single group of people. The fact that the NHS is still fundamentally paper based, in 2016, is exactly the kind of problem that leads politicians to want more use of the private sector. In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started. In fact it's fair to say that the NHS has shown no ability to fundamentally improve itself. It deploys new medical techniques and drugs (developed in the private sector) but when it comes to changing the organisation or adapting to new business ideas, like computerisation, it has utterly failed. This is very frustrating for the politicians who are ultimately held accountable for the performance of the NHS. They sit right at the very top and can hardly influence anything - all they can do is set general directions like "use computers for medical records", and then watch helplessly as the incompetent staff below them screw it up, over and over again. Meanwhile they watch as Google or Facebook go on to build self driving cars and global communication networks. Worse, as students of politics, they know full well what the reason is: the NHS is a classic, communist style top down command-and-control system. Deep institutional rot is exactly what to expect from such an arrangement. Yet they can't change it because the British have an irrational knee jerk reaction to anything that implies people in the private sector can be equally or more competent than people in the public sector.
- d_j_b 10y ago
  > In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started. They started a year ago: http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2015/08/will-nhsuk-be-next-govuk http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2015/08/will-nhsuk-be-next-...
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    Let's judge whether they started or not once they actually get somewhere ...

retbull 10y ago

It isn't like that doesn't happen here in the US. That sounds like part bureaucratic problem and part difficulty of diagnosis. I know plenty of people who ended up in similar situations or got the wrong diagnosis for years despite having pretty good medical insurance. You'd still have to get your medical records transferred around.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

zigzigzag 10y ago

You talk about "they" as if government is a single group of people. The fact that the NHS is still fundamentally paper based, in 2016, is exactly the kind of problem that leads politicians to want more use of the private sector. In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started. In fact it's fair to say that the NHS has shown no ability to fundamentally improve itself. It deploys new medical techniques and drugs (developed in the private sector) but when it comes to changing the organisation or adapting to new business ideas, like computerisation, it has utterly failed. This is very frustrating for the politicians who are ultimately held accountable for the performance of the NHS. They sit right at the very top and can hardly influence anything - all they can do is set general directions like "use computers for medical records", and then watch helplessly as the incompetent staff below them screw it up, over and over again. Meanwhile they watch as Google or Facebook go on to build self driving cars and global communication networks. Worse, as students of politics, they know full well what the reason is: the NHS is a classic, communist style top down command-and-control system. Deep institutional rot is exactly what to expect from such an arrangement. Yet they can't change it because the British have an irrational knee jerk reaction to anything that implies people in the private sector can be equally or more competent than people in the public sector.

d_j_b 10y ago
> In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started. They started a year ago: http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2015/08/will-nhsuk-be-next-govuk http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2015/08/will-nhsuk-be-next-...
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Let's judge whether they started or not once they actually get somewhere ...