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This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place

This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist. Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door. Let's be clear: we do need many more doctors and nurses, but the existing ones can't do their jobs because their wards have turned into medically-fit nursing homes. They spend half their days trying to send people (who don't have care requirements) home faster than they'd like. Why? Because central government withdrew funding. Social care is now on the council to fund and many councils have squashed social care, along with libraries and early years provisions. The trap of outsourcing caught many councils out. Turns out the whole endeavour was yet more myopic, Tory penny-pinching.

xtracto 4y ago
It is too bad that corrupt government officials keep systemically defunding Social Health programs with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense). Then they point to the deficient healthcare and blame the "socialized" aspect of it for the issues. Here in Mexico we've seen it all play out: We had an amazing social healthcare system (in the form of the IMSS) in the 70s and 80s. But the corrupt government officials kept dismantling it and allowing corruption to run rampant within the system. All to get a piece of the private for-profit health system including Health Insurance. Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. I seriously hope it doesn't have the same outcome as our system had in Mexico. For-profit health is inhumane.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  2004 was the peak of Blair-Brown Labour party investment. They didn't get it all right. They used PFI and outsourcing to fudge the sums on major investments, and I dare say they didn't invest in mental and social health care in the amount required. But nobody ever has. The job of fixing this is so expensive and requires so much political force. We're still worried French immigrants are going to eat our dingos, or something. I'm fairly certain now we're destined to limp into an American insurance model; eat the poor.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - origin_path 4y ago
    The Blair/Brown years left the country bankrupt. They literally left the coalition a note saying "there's no money left" https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-note-successor https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/20... PFI was used because it was a way to get "free money" for the NHS by pushing the real costs into the future. The core problem for the socialized model is that nobody can assemble a voter coalition that agrees to raise taxes. The poorer Labour voters say no, the rich should pay, or alternatively, the money already exists it's just the evil Tories refusing to fund the system. The more affluent conservative voters say no, because either, the NHS is wasting money and should fix that first e.g. the massive spend on diversity officers, or, the NHS is always overloaded due to uncontrolled immigration, so fix that first. The NHS doesn't have enough admin support as a result. Then the woke middle classes say no, reducing immigration is awful and we will fight it all the way and of course we won't pay higher taxes because if we allowed unlimited immigration the new taxes from all the highly skilled doctor/engineer immigrants would fix the problems. In the UK there's also the issue that the social care workforce was one of the only professions forced to take vaccines. Lots quit and the rest learned that they have fewer human rights than other people. So having treated the social care workforce like shit, which was already overstretched, the system is now in total collapse for lack of workers. State run systems always have problems like this. It's one size fits all, so the different groups with their different priorities can never agree and the result is deadlock and collapse. The people who run it are too far removed from the front line and the "too big to fail" problem rears its ugly head. The NHS could never survive as is, it's just a pity that it had to end like this.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense) Maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but it makes their buddies in the private sector a lot of money. And that's the game in capitalism, making a lot of money. The government competing with affordable options for everyone against the private sector is "bad for business".
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Let’s not pretend corruption is unique to capitalism.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      That's not what I said.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        The game in socialism is also making a lot of money.
        Jensson 4y ago
        Problem: Politicians are corrupt! Solution: Give more power to politicians! Lack of power corrupts, need to give them more until they stop being corrupt! Not sure why anyone thinks that would work.
        pydry 4y ago
        Because politicians are accountable to voters and unless the monopolies are nationalized the monopolies are accountable to no one.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        > politicians are accountable to voters And then what happens to minority interests? How about we have a national vote on what phone you get? Which car you get? Whether carrots or tomatoes get produced? What movies get produced? What clothes are produced? Which diseases get funding? What apartment you get? How many ounces of meat you get per week? What music you get to listen to? What could go wrong with that?
- eikenberry 4y ago
  When you put politicians in charge of healthcare they will play politics with it. Politicians playing politics doesn't make sense to you? Remember most don't really care that much about the healthcare itself, only how it can be used to further their agenda and be spun for their constituency. It's the tradeoff from private where the money rules.
- jfk13 4y ago
  > Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. That sounds like some seriously rose-tinted nostalgia to me. Yes, the NHS certainly has its problems. But within the past decade, my wife has been through several fairly major health issues, including cancer, and our overall experience of UK healthcare has been quite positive. She is from the US (and had "good" insurance there), but feels that the UK system has served her far better than the American ever did.
- WhyIsItGlowing 4y ago
  > Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. In a lot of respects, this isn't very accurate. It got pretty bad in the early '90s, anything that needed to go beyond the GP had really bad wait times, people stuck on trolleys in A&E, etc. By 2004 it was much better, so that anything which required a hospital visit would be dealt with much more quickly and effectively but the GPs were coming under more pressure from a growing and aging population so the first point of contact had a less personal touch.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    I have to wonder how much of the current "crises" we are seeing right now are simply because of a massive aging population. Of course the medical system is going to have issues, no matter if it is public or private, if you suddenly increase the demand, as the older you get the more health care you need, while at the same time all your most capable and experienced doctors are retiring. Another is housing, right now we have one generation coming up right as the most populous generation is towards the end of their life, resulting in an increased demand and price, in 20 years as more and more the later generations start passing on they'll be leaving behind houses and properties, it's not like those disappear when the people do. I've noticed that the media seems very engaged in making everything the crises of the moment and the focus on looking at things over the course of years or decades is often ignored in favor of sensationalism.
    - spiralx 4y ago
      An aging population is a significant factor, another one is the increasing range of treatments available today - and of course they combine because most medical expenditure happens during the last part of a person's life.
- throwaway049 4y ago
  In 2004 when I worked in NHS emergency care we had such a problem with no space in ED to unload ambulances that the ambulance service threatened to put a mass casualty tent in the hospital car park.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
cjrp 4y ago
> libraries and early years provisions Seen exactly this in my local area. Libraries closing or cutting hours/resources. The number of children's centres (where you go for check-ups/weigh-ins of young kids, to get feeding advice, etc.) reduced by 80+% in some counties. It's dire. Some relevant graphs here: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/local-government-funding-england https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/local-g...
prof-dr-ir 4y ago
This certainly makes a lot of sense, and although I am happy to believe you I am having a hard time convincing my grandma that you are right. Do you maybe have a source for your claims that would convince her? A simple news article from a reputable source would probably suffice.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o118 https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o118 12-16% drop in community care bed availability https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/care-home-bed-availability https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/care-home-bed-avai...
vorpalhex 4y ago
It appears NHS funding has increased year over year: https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/
- Peanuts99 4y ago
  Still not in line with what is required. An aging population which is also living longer couple with poor staff retention and management has left it in a much worse state that 12 years ago.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  None of those figures are per capita, so it's ignoring population growth.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  Cash doesn't help bedflow if it's not going towards the places required for getting people out of hospital… which I've already said is now a local issue. Job deterioration, Brexit and the pension cap have all lead to an increase in more expensive locum cover. Few people want to be locked into a job where you have a daily meeting to be shouted at by your site team for not discharging people who have nowhere to go.
- Quarrelsome 4y ago
  you're misunderstanding the issue. NHS funding _always_ increases. Its not increased by enough and social care (a different budget) has been cut meaning that hospitals have to deal with patients that have nowhere to be discharged. This is all due to 2008 can kicking. The needed to cut, didn't want to get blamed for cutting so just massively cut central funding for councils who were left to make the hard decisions. Year on year the cuts increased the drive for "efficiencies" grew. There is no slack left and nothing left to cut that isn't obvious. I hope that someone learns that just because you've taken the cost of the balance sheet doesn't mean the problem it was solving goes away, it just ends up as an inefficiency somewhere else, in this case in the NHS where staff cannot discharge perfectly healthy patients.
usrusrusrusr 4y ago
>Social care is now on the council to fund and many councils have squashed social care, along with libraries and early years provisions. The trap of outsourcing caught many councils out. It could be phrased as - social care was a way to paper over cultural and societal cracks, by paying peanuts to people with limited job choices. As in most things, our response to Covid has just exposed the endgame much quicker than expected.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist. Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door. How does that manifest as ambulance wait times? Do you think ambulance drivers are sitting around for an hour before responding to calls for help because... the hospital is full? That's like saying my train to the airport was late because the airport was full, it doesn't make much sense. How does one back up into the other?
- dia80 4y ago
  Yes, The ambulances are waiting outside the hospitals with the last patient so they can't go to get the next one. Source: Family members have recently waited some hours outside A&E in an ambulance.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    This is hard to believe. Just wheel the patient through the front door and let the hospital do the babysitting. There is no sense in using an ambulance as a waiting room.
    - roywiggins 4y ago
      The emergency department fills up because they can't find beds to admit people to. When the emergency department is full, there's nowhere for the ambulance patients to be put. Just one of many, many stories on this: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-61395685 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-61395685
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      The patients are waiting in the ambulance because the waiting room is full, but I see your point. Why not just tip the patient onto the pavement outside the waiting room? I'm sure a full hospital with a full waiting room won't be to busy to sort that out.
Ferrotin 4y ago
It’s almost as if centralized control of resources doesn’t allocate them optimally.
- owisd 4y ago
  Seems to work better in this case, as essentially the only buyer of pharmaceuticals in the country the NHS are in a better position to negotiate deals in bulk than if hospitals had to negotiate individually. The UK has higher life expectancy than the USA for 2.5x less per capita healthcare spending.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  No, you've learned the wrong lesson. It's almost as if a locally allocated choice between collecting the bins and homing grandma will always go with what inconveniences voters least. Areas with poor, old populations can never pay their way. The excess gets dumped on the centrally funded NHS. It's a bad model that is a massive disservice to us all.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    >Areas with poor, old populations can never pay their way. The root of the issue is that this area is now the country. Giving all old people the labor necessary to support them in old age was easier when the ratio of working people to non working people was much higher, in conjunction with old people not living as long. Turn that population pyramid upside down due to drastically reduced birthrates and medical technology allowing people to live longer, and you get the current situation.
    - oliwarner 4y ago
      You say that like it's an imperative but it's not. This is a choice. Through the government we elected, we choose to starve social care. We choose to starve education and so many other public services. Yes, our age profile made it more expensive, but so what? We choose to underfund it.
aaron695 4y ago
dustinmoris 4y ago
People can’t be sent home because English people don’t give a shit about their family members. Brits think that the government should provide everything for them, even something simple as looking after an elderly person who is otherwise fine. What happened to family bonds and a bit of responsibility? Every winter around Christmas young family members (40-50 year olds) refuse to take their parents home because “they don’t want them at home over Christmas as it’s inconvenient for them” so they literally demand from the hospital staff to keep them in hospital for 1 or 2 weeks longer. Unfortunately the NHS is not allowed to dump these patients on the street. The problem is brazen entitlement. The NHS needs reform. Zero tolerance for those parasites, charge people for not showing up to appointments, charge people for simple medicines, charge people for choosing to be obese through an obesity tax.
ETH_start 4y ago
I don't understand. Social welfare spending, as a share of GDP, has never been higher in the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun?country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... And this is amidst rising inflation adjusted per capita GDP, meaning even more rapid rise in real per capita social welfare spending. Where is this "Tory penny-pinching" happening?

xtracto 4y ago

It is too bad that corrupt government officials keep systemically defunding Social Health programs with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense). Then they point to the deficient healthcare and blame the "socialized" aspect of it for the issues. Here in Mexico we've seen it all play out: We had an amazing social healthcare system (in the form of the IMSS) in the 70s and 80s. But the corrupt government officials kept dismantling it and allowing corruption to run rampant within the system. All to get a piece of the private for-profit health system including Health Insurance. Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. I seriously hope it doesn't have the same outcome as our system had in Mexico. For-profit health is inhumane.

oliwarner 4y ago
2004 was the peak of Blair-Brown Labour party investment. They didn't get it all right. They used PFI and outsourcing to fudge the sums on major investments, and I dare say they didn't invest in mental and social health care in the amount required. But nobody ever has. The job of fixing this is so expensive and requires so much political force. We're still worried French immigrants are going to eat our dingos, or something. I'm fairly certain now we're destined to limp into an American insurance model; eat the poor.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- origin_path 4y ago
  The Blair/Brown years left the country bankrupt. They literally left the coalition a note saying "there's no money left" https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-note-successor https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/20... PFI was used because it was a way to get "free money" for the NHS by pushing the real costs into the future. The core problem for the socialized model is that nobody can assemble a voter coalition that agrees to raise taxes. The poorer Labour voters say no, the rich should pay, or alternatively, the money already exists it's just the evil Tories refusing to fund the system. The more affluent conservative voters say no, because either, the NHS is wasting money and should fix that first e.g. the massive spend on diversity officers, or, the NHS is always overloaded due to uncontrolled immigration, so fix that first. The NHS doesn't have enough admin support as a result. Then the woke middle classes say no, reducing immigration is awful and we will fight it all the way and of course we won't pay higher taxes because if we allowed unlimited immigration the new taxes from all the highly skilled doctor/engineer immigrants would fix the problems. In the UK there's also the issue that the social care workforce was one of the only professions forced to take vaccines. Lots quit and the rest learned that they have fewer human rights than other people. So having treated the social care workforce like shit, which was already overstretched, the system is now in total collapse for lack of workers. State run systems always have problems like this. It's one size fits all, so the different groups with their different priorities can never agree and the result is deadlock and collapse. The people who run it are too far removed from the front line and the "too big to fail" problem rears its ugly head. The NHS could never survive as is, it's just a pity that it had to end like this.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense) Maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but it makes their buddies in the private sector a lot of money. And that's the game in capitalism, making a lot of money. The government competing with affordable options for everyone against the private sector is "bad for business".
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Let’s not pretend corruption is unique to capitalism.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    That's not what I said.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      The game in socialism is also making a lot of money.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        Problem: Politicians are corrupt! Solution: Give more power to politicians! Lack of power corrupts, need to give them more until they stop being corrupt! Not sure why anyone thinks that would work.
        pydry 4y ago
        Because politicians are accountable to voters and unless the monopolies are nationalized the monopolies are accountable to no one.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        > politicians are accountable to voters And then what happens to minority interests? How about we have a national vote on what phone you get? Which car you get? Whether carrots or tomatoes get produced? What movies get produced? What clothes are produced? Which diseases get funding? What apartment you get? How many ounces of meat you get per week? What music you get to listen to? What could go wrong with that?
eikenberry 4y ago
When you put politicians in charge of healthcare they will play politics with it. Politicians playing politics doesn't make sense to you? Remember most don't really care that much about the healthcare itself, only how it can be used to further their agenda and be spun for their constituency. It's the tradeoff from private where the money rules.
jfk13 4y ago
> Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. That sounds like some seriously rose-tinted nostalgia to me. Yes, the NHS certainly has its problems. But within the past decade, my wife has been through several fairly major health issues, including cancer, and our overall experience of UK healthcare has been quite positive. She is from the US (and had "good" insurance there), but feels that the UK system has served her far better than the American ever did.
WhyIsItGlowing 4y ago
> Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s. In a lot of respects, this isn't very accurate. It got pretty bad in the early '90s, anything that needed to go beyond the GP had really bad wait times, people stuck on trolleys in A&E, etc. By 2004 it was much better, so that anything which required a hospital visit would be dealt with much more quickly and effectively but the GPs were coming under more pressure from a growing and aging population so the first point of contact had a less personal touch.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I have to wonder how much of the current "crises" we are seeing right now are simply because of a massive aging population. Of course the medical system is going to have issues, no matter if it is public or private, if you suddenly increase the demand, as the older you get the more health care you need, while at the same time all your most capable and experienced doctors are retiring. Another is housing, right now we have one generation coming up right as the most populous generation is towards the end of their life, resulting in an increased demand and price, in 20 years as more and more the later generations start passing on they'll be leaving behind houses and properties, it's not like those disappear when the people do. I've noticed that the media seems very engaged in making everything the crises of the moment and the focus on looking at things over the course of years or decades is often ignored in favor of sensationalism.
  - spiralx 4y ago
    An aging population is a significant factor, another one is the increasing range of treatments available today - and of course they combine because most medical expenditure happens during the last part of a person's life.
throwaway049 4y ago
In 2004 when I worked in NHS emergency care we had such a problem with no space in ED to unload ambulances that the ambulance service threatened to put a mass casualty tent in the hospital car park.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

cjrp 4y ago

> libraries and early years provisions Seen exactly this in my local area. Libraries closing or cutting hours/resources. The number of children's centres (where you go for check-ups/weigh-ins of young kids, to get feeding advice, etc.) reduced by 80+% in some counties. It's dire. Some relevant graphs here: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/local-government-funding-england https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/local-g...

prof-dr-ir 4y ago

This certainly makes a lot of sense, and although I am happy to believe you I am having a hard time convincing my grandma that you are right. Do you maybe have a source for your claims that would convince her? A simple news article from a reputable source would probably suffice.

oliwarner 4y ago
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o118 https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o118 12-16% drop in community care bed availability https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/care-home-bed-availability https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/care-home-bed-avai...

vorpalhex 4y ago

It appears NHS funding has increased year over year: https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/

Peanuts99 4y ago
Still not in line with what is required. An aging population which is also living longer couple with poor staff retention and management has left it in a much worse state that 12 years ago.
RobotToaster 4y ago
None of those figures are per capita, so it's ignoring population growth.
oliwarner 4y ago
Cash doesn't help bedflow if it's not going towards the places required for getting people out of hospital… which I've already said is now a local issue. Job deterioration, Brexit and the pension cap have all lead to an increase in more expensive locum cover. Few people want to be locked into a job where you have a daily meeting to be shouted at by your site team for not discharging people who have nowhere to go.
Quarrelsome 4y ago
you're misunderstanding the issue. NHS funding _always_ increases. Its not increased by enough and social care (a different budget) has been cut meaning that hospitals have to deal with patients that have nowhere to be discharged. This is all due to 2008 can kicking. The needed to cut, didn't want to get blamed for cutting so just massively cut central funding for councils who were left to make the hard decisions. Year on year the cuts increased the drive for "efficiencies" grew. There is no slack left and nothing left to cut that isn't obvious. I hope that someone learns that just because you've taken the cost of the balance sheet doesn't mean the problem it was solving goes away, it just ends up as an inefficiency somewhere else, in this case in the NHS where staff cannot discharge perfectly healthy patients.

usrusrusrusr 4y ago

>Social care is now on the council to fund and many councils have squashed social care, along with libraries and early years provisions. The trap of outsourcing caught many councils out. It could be phrased as - social care was a way to paper over cultural and societal cracks, by paying peanuts to people with limited job choices. As in most things, our response to Covid has just exposed the endgame much quicker than expected.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> This isn't a collapse of emergency healthcare, it's a very predicted collapse of community social care: hospitals can't discharge if they need a care home place that doesn't exist. Without inpatient bed availability, ERs and AMUs can't admit to specialties and everything gums up at the front door. How does that manifest as ambulance wait times? Do you think ambulance drivers are sitting around for an hour before responding to calls for help because... the hospital is full? That's like saying my train to the airport was late because the airport was full, it doesn't make much sense. How does one back up into the other?

dia80 4y ago
Yes, The ambulances are waiting outside the hospitals with the last patient so they can't go to get the next one. Source: Family members have recently waited some hours outside A&E in an ambulance.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  This is hard to believe. Just wheel the patient through the front door and let the hospital do the babysitting. There is no sense in using an ambulance as a waiting room.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    The emergency department fills up because they can't find beds to admit people to. When the emergency department is full, there's nowhere for the ambulance patients to be put. Just one of many, many stories on this: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-61395685 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-61395685
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The patients are waiting in the ambulance because the waiting room is full, but I see your point. Why not just tip the patient onto the pavement outside the waiting room? I'm sure a full hospital with a full waiting room won't be to busy to sort that out.

Ferrotin 4y ago

It’s almost as if centralized control of resources doesn’t allocate them optimally.

owisd 4y ago
Seems to work better in this case, as essentially the only buyer of pharmaceuticals in the country the NHS are in a better position to negotiate deals in bulk than if hospitals had to negotiate individually. The UK has higher life expectancy than the USA for 2.5x less per capita healthcare spending.
oliwarner 4y ago
No, you've learned the wrong lesson. It's almost as if a locally allocated choice between collecting the bins and homing grandma will always go with what inconveniences voters least. Areas with poor, old populations can never pay their way. The excess gets dumped on the centrally funded NHS. It's a bad model that is a massive disservice to us all.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >Areas with poor, old populations can never pay their way. The root of the issue is that this area is now the country. Giving all old people the labor necessary to support them in old age was easier when the ratio of working people to non working people was much higher, in conjunction with old people not living as long. Turn that population pyramid upside down due to drastically reduced birthrates and medical technology allowing people to live longer, and you get the current situation.
  - oliwarner 4y ago
    You say that like it's an imperative but it's not. This is a choice. Through the government we elected, we choose to starve social care. We choose to starve education and so many other public services. Yes, our age profile made it more expensive, but so what? We choose to underfund it.

aaron695 4y ago

dustinmoris 4y ago

People can’t be sent home because English people don’t give a shit about their family members. Brits think that the government should provide everything for them, even something simple as looking after an elderly person who is otherwise fine. What happened to family bonds and a bit of responsibility? Every winter around Christmas young family members (40-50 year olds) refuse to take their parents home because “they don’t want them at home over Christmas as it’s inconvenient for them” so they literally demand from the hospital staff to keep them in hospital for 1 or 2 weeks longer. Unfortunately the NHS is not allowed to dump these patients on the street. The problem is brazen entitlement. The NHS needs reform. Zero tolerance for those parasites, charge people for not showing up to appointments, charge people for simple medicines, charge people for choosing to be obese through an obesity tax.

ETH_start 4y ago

I don't understand. Social welfare spending, as a share of GDP, has never been higher in the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun?country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... And this is amidst rising inflation adjusted per capita GDP, meaning even more rapid rise in real per capita social welfare spending. Where is this "Tory penny-pinching" happening?