Fonz wrote:Minnie the Minx wrote:Toby wrote:Perhaps, I don't know. The reality though is that most of the things we do have some sort of negative impact somewhere along the line, just as they do have a positive one.
The creation of the NHS is on the whole, a positive thing. But I suspect that no-one who saw it being born would have forseen it becoming the, what, 4th or 5th largest employer in the world, a political football of immense proportions and having to treat people for conditions that didn't even exist in 1945.
What sort of conditions are you thinking of?
Hip replacements
A hip replacement isn't a condition, it's treatment for a condition. And without trying to be an arse, the reason I mention that is that Toby brought the NHS into the conversation (at least that's the way it read to me) in a conversation about positives and negatives of the NHS. He discussed what couldn't be predicted in 1945, possibly as a lead into discussing what is causing the NHS to not function. (Those are my words, I'm happy to accept that is not what Toby meant.)
Hip replacements are not causing the NHS to buckle. Goat Boy identifies an issue of higher clinical significance.
My post comes from my own experience of working in the NHS for 20 years. Three quarters of that was clinically based, but the rest of that time was working intimately with bed managers, planning, emergency medicine, patient flow. I have been very much in the belly of the beast and I could write a book on the varied and complex issues that cause the NHS to slow. I have friends who are COO of local hospitals who have to summarise in icy precision every day the factors that are having an impact on their ability to deliver care.
I am passionate about the NHS, but I also understand that it can't just "remain the same". How that is addressed is something I can hardly begin to piece together in my head, as I have to become dispassionate and understand far more about economics than I currently do (I know nothing about economics.)
How we address an increasingly ageing population who come into hospital often and for long periods for non -acute issues (and sometimes acute issues) sits at the heart of this very difficult conversation. Funding and inadequate social provision add to the problem.